Owensboro will soon be home to the largest brewery west of Louisville when Brew Bridge, located downtown at 800 W. 2nd St., opens up this spring.
Owners David Haynes and Max Garvin — creators and owners of Escape Today — have put months of work into creating downtown’s first brewery in decades. Located on the edge of The District, where open containers of alcohol can be carried from place to place, and only a few strides away from the Ohio River, riverfront hotels and Owensboro Convention Center, the Brew Bridge has the potential to be a game-changer for downtown Owensboro.
“This location is fantastic,” Haynes said. “We’re the only place downtown that has a parking lot, pretty much. It was always all about parking [for planning and zoning].”
The outdoor patio at Brew Bridge is spacious, providing room for dozens of tables and outdoor activities. The patio area transports you to the brewery scene in Asheville, N.C., where big-name breweries keep customers coming back by utilizing their outdoor space to the fullest extent.
Haynes said the entire brewery, both inside and out, contains 4,999 square feet of space.
“We’re looking at 55 tables out here, so it’ll be a huge patio,” he said. “That field will have some games like cornhole and others. The parking lot, we’re going to convert an area of it into other adult-oriented games. We’re going to have a mobile ax-throwing trailer out there and try to have a food truck out here.”
Master Brewer William Johnson has lived in Louisville the past couple of years, having brewed 400 batches during his time in the big city. His goal is to run through 160 different beer recipes during Brew Bridge’s first year in business.
Brew Bridge will start out brewing eight beers of their own. These beers will range in style, but Johnson said he wants to start out with a blonde ale, a St. Patrick’s export stout, an Irish red, a good, basic IPA, a lighter Cerveza and a pilsner. Johnson hopes Brew Bridge’s pilsner can help bridge the gap between craft beer and domestic beer drinkers.
“Bud Light is a pilsner, so we want to try and work them from Bud Light to our pilsner,” he said.
Haynes said that he’d eventually like to see Brew Bridge serve 15 beers of their own on tap and offer five others from local breweries in the area.
Brew Bridge will have a kitchen operating inside very soon, Haynes said, serving a full menu of items ranging from chicken and waffles to burgers, nachos and fries. The brewery already has almost everything it needs in order to serve food, including RWRA, OMPC, City Plumbing permits, and they also have their federal and state brewing licenses.
Brew Bridge has a very unique component that others in the City don’t have — an outdoor-facing bar.
“These are illegal now, but we’re grandfathered in. So we can actually serve directly to the outside space from inside,” Haynes said.
One thing that’s hindered Brew Bridge from opening this March is their recently-discovered need for a new roof. Construction has already begun on replacing it, but Haynes said the brewery plans to operate on an outdoors-only basis — with hopes to open that to the public in April — until the roof is completely finished.
One of Brew Bridge’s themes will be transparency, both style-wise and science-wise.
“We want people to understand the process. We don’t want people to think it’s some big, dark secret on how to brew beer, and no one can do it except for us,” he said. “When you walk in, a bunch of our equipment will be in the entrance door, covered in plexiglass. And if people come early enough in the day, they’ll actually get to see us brewing in the brewhouse.”
And while Brew Bridge will feature some beers for the craft beer geeks, their goal is to be an accessible, welcoming brewery for the people of Owensboro. In fact, Haynes said Garvin, Johnson and himself have had the people of Owensboro in mind during this entire process.
“It’s a brewery for Owensboro — a really accessible Owensboro brewery,” Haynes said. “A lot of people make the mistake of creating a bar or brewery they’d wanna drink in, and that hasn’t worked for at least 10 places downtown. So we have to really look at Owensboro, and look at what’s been successful and take bits and pieces of Owensboro to create a successful brewery here. It’s not for us — it’s for the community.”
