HighGrain Hopes To Become Part Of A New Neighborhood With Brentwood

Written By: The Gnarly Gnome
Photography By: The Gnarly Gnome

5/6/2024

It’s hard to open your already existing brewery in a space that was a community hub for decades before you took it over. It sets you up for people to walk into your doors with expectations, often lofty ones. That’s exactly what is happening with the new HighGrain Brewing Company location over in Springfield Township at the former Brentwood Bowl building on Winton Road.

I might be getting a little bit ahead of myself, though. Let’s talk about HighGrain just in case you are new around here.

Who Is HighGrain Brewery, Anyways?

It might seem like a new brewery to anyone who doesn’t venture out of their neighborhood very often, but this new space is really a new piece of the puzzle for a brewery that opened up in Silverton in 2019. When they opened up their doors there, it was a similar story, just maybe in a smaller way. They took over a former Municipal building (again, a bit of a hub for a community) and put in a brewpub that quickly outgrew it’s space due to not only amazing food and beer, but a brilliant understanding of how to become part of the neighborhood around you.

Once they started packaging their beer, their space, although great for a restaurant or small brewpub was not nearly enough to carry the business into the next phase of its life. Thus… the search began.

Finding Brentwood Bowl

Brentwood is located in Springfield Township, and was a community staple for decades until closing its doors during covid. The township, desperate to save a space that means a ton to anyone who spend time here connected with HighGrain and plans were put into motion.

The brilliance of this matchup is that it’s not that far off from what they did when they opened their doors in Silverton. They’re walking into a community that already has strong roots, into a space that means a lot to a ton of people – and I think that they’re going to do it amazing justice.

The Brentwood building is massive, though. This is not a cookie-cutter replication of the magic they created last time. It is a whole new animal.

What To Expect When You Walk In HighGrain Brentwood

Walking in the doors, you’ll immediately realize this is NOT a brewery in an old bowling alley. The space has been completely renovated into a modern brewpub. One side of the open dining room houses the big bar. The other side features the kitchen and a coffee bar (we’ll talk about that in a minute) – glass doors at one end of the room showcase the huge production brewery (again… we’ll talk about that), and a glass garage door at the other end shows off a big event space.

The outside space features a huge covered patio with its own bar for events, and a patio out front is ready to go for even more outdoor seating as they get things up and rolling.

Hidden behind walls is a massive space that houses storage for the brewery, as well as two other businesses. Revel Winery now lives here, and produces wine out of their own space (without a storefront) – and LaTerza Coffee has their roasting facility in the warehouse as well… we should talk about that.

Mornings, Work From Home, And The Community

This addition of a coffee concept to the taproom itself is critical to the bigger picture of HighGrain. The brewery is hoping to attract plenty of folks who live around them to come in and spend their mornings and afternoons in the space. Coffee and Wi-fi are pretty much the base ingredients that anyone who works from “home” needs to get things done.

It all goes back to that desire to become a big part of the community around them. For me, as someone who enjoys working from breweries much more than I do holed up in my basement office. THIS is good stuff.

You can come into the brewery early, grab a coffee and a light snack, work all morning – grab lunch and a beer, and keep working all afternoon. This is how I want to work.

What It Means For The Future

HighGrain has a great advantage to watch how other places locally have grown as they hit this pinch point in their business. There are things that have worked, things that haven’t and ways to keep growing even when people like to talk about the shrinking market of craft beer.

Sure, the brewery will make more beer out of this location, but even more importantly, it will attract even more people who aren’t here just because of craft beer. I’m thrilled to see how they take this ball and run with it.