Our History
A lot of people have asked us how all this started and here is the general story.
In 2015 two of our owners Nathaniel Sears and Andrew Armstrong both enrolled in the Professional Brewing Certificate program at Knoxville’s South College. They quickly became friends while volunteering at various Knoxville breweries and while studying for class. Later that year both began their careers as professional brewers, Nathaniel locally with Saw Works Brewing, and Andrew on the west coast at North Coast Brewing Company.
While working as the head brewer at Saw Works, Nathaniel hired our other owner Rick Cox as his assistant where they worked until its demise in 2017.
In the fall of 2017 Rick and Nathaniel decided to start a brewery which at that time remained nameless. Later that fall when they had found a suitable location they reached out to Andrew in California to see if he was interested in joining the project.
Andrew moved from California back to Knoxville in the summer of 2018 to work with Rick and Nathaniel on securing funding for the brewery. Many meetings with many banks were had but nothing was able to worked out until we were introduced to Pathway Lending by our friend and now Chairmen of our Board of Directors, Ken Woody. In March of 2019 we secured our funding.
This is when the fun (if you can call it that) started. Construction began in April 2019 with the initial sand blasting of the building. We did much of the work ourselves both to save money and because we were capable of doing it and since we were all focused full time on getting the doors open we had the time. That’s not to say that we didn’t have some amazing (and some not so amazing) subcontractors along the way. We had our ups and our downs, we had the typical surprises but through all this we kept #grindingeveryday.
On Friday December 13th we opened our doors. As I am writing this we have been open a month now and we keep working every day to improve our taproom and brewery location as well as improve our policies and procedures. One thing is for certain, we will not take short cuts on quality and will always strive to bring you the highest quality product we can. Please come and sit at our bar and ask us any questions you may have. We are happy to share all the crazy stories we experienced during the construction phase and those we are having right now.