An Update on Iron Horse Brewery Drinking Locations.

written in conjunction with Greg Parker and Brooke Kvinsland

Hello, Class of 2021.

Well, January has officially come and gone, oh and February has too.

We’re reasonably confident that Covid 19 has messed with the space-time continuum. 

Anyhow, we wanted to provide a little status update on our various hopes and dreams that we outlined way back in December 2020.  

First, The Shack or The Shed.  (read about that promise here)

Long story short.  It’s not happening. 

Perhaps we were overly optimistic about time frames because our brewery license already allows us to sell products directly from the production facility or perhaps we underestimated the level of tap dancing required to make a temporary shed a temporary destination for beer to go. In either case, those pipe dreams have been dashed.

Your best recourse is to order beer for local delivery here, delivered by Ano Delivery on Wednesdays.

Another solid alternative is to visit any of your local area bars and restaurants that carry Iron Horse Beer to satiate your liquid craft draft libations.

If you are looking to ship beer online, head over to this site.

If you are interested in reserving kegs of beer, please contact Brooke directly here.  

We are frustrated too, but there’s a silver lining. More on that shortly.

Second, the [ the pub ] on PEARL. (note this isn’t the silver lining)

This project is on pause.

You might be wondering, is Iron Horse Brewery flip-flopping more than a dorm shower stall?

Honestly, I’m not sure what that really means except that you should always wear flip-flops in a public shower. 

The answer is, “It probably looks that way.” 

To be extra open about this. It comes down to Money. We don’t want to take on more debt and spend finite resources on this project, given the uncertainty or our times in addition to the opportunities we think we have with our primary focus for our fans. We want to keep our organization on a stable financial footing in the interest of avoiding circumstances under which cutting jobs and laying off people become a path to consider. We think that putting the pub on hold and focusing on the beer park is one of the trade-offs to ensure that outcome. 

This means that our plans to open the pub on pearl sometime in the spring are not happening. The likelihood that it opens in 2021 is slim. If we were you, we would eliminate the idea of the pub on pearl happening at all. It’s probably safer for your mental well-being.  

To be very clear, another [ the pub ] is not off the table; it is just paused indefinitely.

Those keeping scores put us at 0-2 for things we said we wanted to do. Fail forward, right?

Finally, [ The Beer Park ] by Iron Horse Brewery is very much alive and the container for almost all of our hopes and dreams.  Of all of the projects we’ve worked on, we think this is the one to get “found a 50 dollar bill in the couch” excited about. This is where we are prioritizing all of our capital and energy resources. It just makes the most sense from an experience level and from a resource perspective. While the pub has been an integral and wonderful part of our story, a park adjacent to the brewery itself where our fans can come drink beer with friends and family in the fresh air, is an offer that we think provides what our communities need most right now, a safe and joyous place to be with others.

The process of creating the beer park is underway. We have completed our SEPA review. Designs are getting finalized. There will be green space, play space, dog space, family space, beer-drinking space, watching and listening to things space. There may be grilling stations to cook your own food – assuming we can make the permitting work – and activities available, possibly including bocce ball.

Rather than keep writing a bunch of words, here is a teaser image of one of the design renderings. We’ll let your imagination run wild on this. This is the silver lining I was referring to.

And to further help your imagination, here is some stock footage of people we don’t know drinking unknown beer in an unknown location that kinda-sorta looks like what we are attempting to create.

So there you have it.  Intentions and guesses being obliterated by reality. 

What are you most looking forward to about a park that you can drink beer at?