Bluewood Brewing

Bluewood Brewing is a microbrewery on the western end of Cherokee Street, and it occupies a building with brewing in its bones: the former Lemp stables, also known as the Corner Gates building, put up in 1892 as part of the William J. Lemp Brewing Company’s holdings. Making beer on the site again is a piece of continuity the neighbourhood appreciates.

The brewery is the work of Cameron Lund and Grant Lodholz, engineers by training who started homebrewing at college and did not stop. That engineering habit shows in what they choose to make. Bluewood specialises in barrel-aged beers and wild fermentation ales – the slow, unpredictable end of brewing, where a beer spends months or years in wood and the result depends on organisms nobody entirely controls. It is the opposite of a house lager brewed to a fixed spec, and it asks a certain patience of the brewery and the drinker alike.

The taproom pours the current range alongside more conventional styles for anyone who did not come for a sour, and the space itself – high, brick, industrial in the way only a nineteenth-century brewery building can be – is a good part of the appeal.

Bluewood was the second brewery to open on Cherokee Street, following Earthbound Brewing, and the pair of them mark how far the street has come back. It stands at the antiques end, within easy walking distance of the shops of Cherokee Antique Row, and makes a reasonable place to finish an afternoon of them.