Lakewood Brewing Company is nipping at the heels of Peticolas Brewing Company and Deep Ellum Brewing Co. to be the third Dallas-area beer maker, but it's not the only start-up on the way.
According to its Facebook page, Reunion Brewing Company last week signed a lease for a space in the Design District, and was recently approved by Kickstarter for a fundraising campaign. You can read the origin story here, but in a nutshell, Reunion is the project of three friends (Jack Sparks, Brent Thompson and Kat Stevens) who met during temporary bartending jobs and then reunited when Thompson and Stevens began homebrewing and called Sparks, who was working as brewmaster at Saya Beer in Bolivia.
The three are keeping their plans pretty close to the vest at the moment but say they will share more as the opening date approaches. They're hoping to open in 10 to 12 months, and will initially brew on their current 1.5-barrel (55 gallon) system but upgrade to a bigger system soon after.
"We are going to brew well balanced, easy drinking, aromatic beers," Thompson writes in an email. "We anticipate offering three core ales year-round and several seasonals."
Those three core ales will likely be an amber, a kölsch and an IPA, says here, but brewmaster Sparks may have other plans before the opening. And while Reunion's 1.5-barrel system is considerably smaller than those of Peticolas and Deep Ellum, they are hoping to bottle right out of the gate, Thompson writes.
