USA, KY: Awry Brewing Co. eyeing summer opening in Louisville
Over the last decade, Alex Vogt, Tom Bartle and Tyler Martin have been working toward their dream of owning and running a craft brewery.
However, each time the trio started to make progress, things went awry, the Courier-Journal reported on May 24.
"I feel like every time we've made a little headway, we've always been pushed back a little and after a few years, we didn't give up on the project,” Martin said. “We've always been passionate about it.”
After more than 15 failed business partners, 14 different business names, four incomplete deals, and countless nights drinking beer trying to solve their problems, the group will finally open Awry Brewing Co. at 1025 Barret Ave. in the former V-Grits building this summer.
After sitting around one night, discussing the loss of yet another deal, one of the three jokingly said "things kept going awry." As the inside joke grew, Bartle kept tossing the word “awry” around to describe their situation, and eventually, the three landed on Awry Brewing Co. as the brewery's name.
“It just stuck,” Martin said.
The craft brewery will be open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. and until midnight on Friday and Saturday. The building is being leased from V-Grits, but the Awry Brewing co-owners bought and own all the equipment inside the building.
"It almost couldn't have been a better situation … this was an opportunity for us to buy a turnkey operation, whereas every other location we looked at we'd have to start from scratch," Bartle, who has a background in the vendor supply side of the beverage industry, said.
Unlike some breweries in the area, Awry Brewing will be a small-batch brewery with five barrels and 12 draft lines, which the three owners see as an advantage.
"It'll give us some flexibility to kind of push the envelope in whatever direction we want, without having to hard commit into a $10,000 batch of beer," Vogt said.
For brewers Martin and Vogt, part of the fun comes from deciding what beers to put on tap.
"We believe that we could do this ... very well," Martin said. "We've just never had the opportunity to ... play around and honestly, be as creative as we both are."
Martin and Vogt, who worked together for years at Against the Grain Brewery and both have years of brewing experience, plan to use their expansive network of brewers and create collaborations with breweries from across the world. Vogt said the group already has a partnership with a brewer from Germany to do brews of beer styles that are no longer around.
"We're really excited about collaborating with not only breweries but restaurants and chefs and wineries and things of that nature," Vogt told the Courier Journal. "We plan on collaborating a lot, doing a lot of traditional and new age, eclectic, weird styles, and kind of letting the people that come to us tell us whatever crazy idea they have."
The three co-owners will blend their expansive alcohol industry backgrounds together with the hopes of turning this Highlands spot into a brewery for locals.
"We're trying to cater more toward the neighborhood," Martin said. "Let's get the Germantown people to walk down, let's get the Highlands people to walk over … even if we can't get people to drive here, if we get people to walk, we've made it."
The group of owners, all from Southern Indiana, originally wanted the open a brewery on the Jeffersonville side of the river, but when the opportunity presented itself in the Original Highlands neighborhood, they couldn’t say no.
"Long story short, we found this (location), and this honestly, was the best opportunity in the end, and we pulled the trigger," Martin said. "I've known this area, it's got amazing traffic, … as soon as that sign can be lit up, people will notice it because this is a very busy intersection."
25 May, 2023
