Game-changing Huntington brewery development planned

A fantastic new brewery-based development could be coming to West Virginia in the next year or so if John Garcia has his way. Garcia, owner of Lookout Brewing in Black Mountain, North Carolina, has developed a plan for a multi-part brewery, entertainment, and food production project and wants to build it in Huntington.

Garcia is currently out seeking the right property on which to build his brewery. He says he’s “chomping at the bit” to get started.

The brewery section of the planned development would house up to a 30-barrel brewhouse, fermentation, barrel aging, and full packaging setup. A spacious taproom and outdoor beer garden would complete the first phase. The next section in the plan would be development of a 1,000 person capacity concert and event center.

In what he envisions as a ten-year plan, Garcia sees additional components focused on environmental sustainability and food production. In a project well beyond a simple brewery, additions could include greenhouses, local farm land, environmentally friendly on-site brewing waste treatment, and recycling of brewing by-products into aquaponics and hydroponics operations growing vegetables, fruit and fish.

Garcia will talk about his big picture plan this Tuesday evening at the Virtual Farm to Bottle Summit. 6-7 p.m. Register for this free session on the Robert C. Byrd Institute website.

A seasoned brewery veteran

Garcia has operated Lookout Brewing since 2013, so he knows the brewing business well. He has shown an ability to do business in the highly competitive Asheville small brewery market. Getting into a second location has been on his mind for quite a while, he said. 

Earlier, he’d looked at Winston-Salem, Knoxville, and bigger cities mostly. But then an analysis of Huntington moved it to the top of the list. He said when he looked at those bigger cities, he would just be another brewery among the many breweries already there. “I didn’t want to be just another one,” he said. “I want to have an emotional tie to a place. I wanted to have a real meaning behind going somewhere. We wanted a place that felt like home and Huntington is really high on that list.”

Garcia likes Huntington’s strategic geographic location and believes it has great access to the population centers of Cincinnati, Columbus, Lexington, and more.

“I think the future of the tourism industry is really big in Huntington. Quite honestly, it’s an untapped market.”

Spent time in Huntington as a child

His emotional connection to Huntington comes from the fact that Garcia lived in Huntington during part of his elementary and middle school years. He attended the former Miller Elementary School and then Cammack Middle School. He left Huntington after the 7th grade. 

His family moved around a good bit, and Garcia eventually ended up living in New England. While there, his best friends moved to Asheville, NC, and in the early 2000s, Garcia visited them there several times. Before long, he made the move to the Asheville area too.

“We just fell in love with Asheville,” he said. “It’s beautiful here.”

He got involved in several business ventures before finally giving the brewing industry a try. About ten years ago, he began bartending in the evenings, while he worked construction during the day. During this period he got to know several people from local breweries, of which there were only eight in the Asheville area at that time.

“This was before the Beer City USA days, and small breweries were not on anyone’s radar as the hot investments they would soon become,” he said. In late 2011, Garcia began homebrewing in the kitchen of the bar where he worked in Black Mountain, a town of roughly 8,000 people about 20 minutes outside Asheville. He only brewed three batches there before he had written a business plan to open his own brewery. His first brews were a pale ale, Scotch ale, and ESB. 

In 2013, he opened Lookout Brewing in a 4,800 sq. ft. four-unit, strip mall building in Black Mountain. Things just grew from there.

His interest in opening a Huntington brewery

Garcia says he’s always kept an eye on Huntington and has some close friends from elementary school days that he’d kept in touch with there. In the summer of 2018, during a visit to the area, he says he noticed a positive shift in Huntington. He was impressed with the downtown redevelopment. He took note of all the local investment in rehabbing buildings, the growth of Marshall University, and in the vitality of Pullman Square. 

“This looks great these days,” he said. When he learned in a conversation with a Huntington friend that the city only had one brewery, that revelation led him to begin considering the possibilities of doing a brewery project there. 

Jeff McKay serves as Huntington ambassador

Then last year while browsing the internet, Garcia happened across a video of a Farm To Bottle craft beer summit posted by Marshall University’s Robert C. Byrd Institute. A panel presentation that included Jeff McKay of Summit Beer Station and Charleston attorney Chuck Johnson caught his attention. Their discussion of efforts to improve West Virginia’s alcohol laws got Garcia excited.

“Jeff and Chuck were amazingly impressive,” he said.

One day, out of the blue, Garcia called Jeff McKay and sought his opinion on the need for another brewery in Huntington. McKay immediately invited Garcia to come to Huntington and said he would take him around, introduce him to some important people, and do whatever he could to help him get this going. Garcia went to Huntington and toured with McKay. He says he had a blast meeting “a ton of really great people.” He found the town very welcoming including the local government people, business leaders, and development groups.

One thing led to another and his yet-unnamed brewery project was hatched. The Brilliant Stream community sure hopes we get to see this project plan become reality.