We did not ever want to own a bar. Or, a restaurant.
In fact, Henry and I both said that multiple times between 2013 - 2018. But by 2019 the writing was on the wall. We needed a better place to host people in Shelburne, and Shelburne needed us to build a great place for locals and tourists to shake hands and share a beer.
So… we did it. We bought a strip mall in the middle of town and built a taproom.
Formerly known as the Loyalist Plaza (we took that sign down right away), most locals still call it ‘the IGA’. But it hadn’t been a grocery store for more than 15 years when we took over. Most recently it had housed a Home Furniture store and it boasts the biggest parking lot in town. But now it also had the biggest tap list in town.
As with all renovation projects it took too long and cost too much money but when we finally opened on August 23, 2019 and I had my first beer sitting on a stool at that beautiful copper bar, I knew we’d done the right thing. The bar was full of people I knew from our community and later that week it would be full to capacity of Albacore sailors who had travelled to Shelburne for the Albacore World Championships. Opening the taproom felt like we had finally arrived in Shelburne. We were Shelburne’s brewery and we had the taproom to prove it.
Big shout out to Terry Piercey, former owner of the Townhouse Pub in Antigonish. He caught the vision of our architect to build a curvy bar, reminiscent of a tentacle, and cover it with the copper sheets that had been sitting outside the brewery for years. He painstakingly created and finished that bar and towards the end he even slept at the taproom to get it all done. He actually slept at the taproom for a few days after we opened as well and famously scared the $%&* out of one of our servers who went upstairs to the safe and discovered him curled up on the floor…but that’s another story.