Stumptown Ales to open Fairmont taproom

We’ve just learned that in the spring of 2023, Stumptown Ales will open a new taproom in Fairmont, WV. The beer elves have sure brought the city some great news this holiday season.

Brilliant Stream confirmed the elves’ report with brewery owners Jon and Cindy Robeson.

“This is a great opportunity,” says Jon. “Fairmont seems like a great city, and we’d like to be a part of revitalizing an area.”

Stumptown Ales had explored other remote locations in the past, including Martinsburg and Charleston, but ultimately decided against establishing taprooms in those locales. Their Charleston exploration, however, did result in Stumptown committing to supply The Pitch with a group of beers so it could have special Stumptown tap sections at the two Charleston area Pitch locations.

Now, the Fairmont location will be Jon and Cindy’s first pub remote from their Davis, WV, brewery. “We’re really excited for this to be our next step,” Cindy says. “I think good things will come.”

No doubt they are excited about prepping the new pub space so it can open next year. “We’re hoping to open in Fairmont sometime mid-spring,” Jon says. They both love that the location has lots of parking very close by.

First brewery on Fairmont’s East Side

Jon explains that real estate investors bought several buildings along Merchant Street on the city’s East Side and are spiffing them up in an effort to redevelop the area. The buildings back up to the popular Palatine Park. The Fairmont Rentals Facebook page post about the 2640 sq. ft. property that Stumptown has now leased, calls it a “beautifully remodeled commercial space centrally located in Fairmont’s historic district.” The address is 306 ½ Merchant Street.

The building sits about a half a block off the Fairmont Gateway Connector — the 4-lane road connecting the area to I-79 about a mile up the hill.

The Stumptown project is serving as a magnet of sorts, which the property owners hope will attract other compatible businesses to the area. Since it had previously housed a bar, most features of the building’s interior are not requiring a lot of work to ready it for Stumptown’s occupancy. The one exception is the construction of a large cold room space, which Stumptown will use to store its beer.

Jon sees the Merchant St. location as one of the last areas of Fairmont that is ripe for redevelopment. He feels the location, which backs up to the Monongahela River and Palatine Park has great promise. Currently, lots of events take place at Palatine Park but there are not many close-by places to go to before and after the events. The new Stumptown Ales location should change that.

New storage space allows production boost

Jon says the brewery has maxed-out the storage capacity at its Davis location, and this currently limits how much beer the brewery can make and keg. Looking ahead, being able to offload some of that beer to Fairmont should help alleviate the bottleneck and make production scheduling easier. Jon added that Stumptown recently purchased a larger delivery van that will help them haul larger amounts of beer to the new storage location.

“We have the production capacity to brew more than we have been, but we just run into this storage capacity issue,” Jon says. Sending beer for storage at the new location will open up room at the Davis brewery to produce more beer with its current equipment — that is the plan.

With this outlook for increased production, Jon is hopeful that he can keep supplying all current accounts that they have been supplying, as well as having plenty of beer for Stumptown Fairmont.

Space layout familiar

Cindy Robeson likes the layout of the new space. “It’s very similar to the footprint of our Davis location,” she said. “Stumptown Fairmont will be Stumptown Fairmont though, but we still want it to have a Stumptown feel.” She plans to decorate the new bar with a few pieces that she will bring over from Davis, but also add things that make it unique, possibly including some pieces connected to the history of Fairmont.

“If we ever had a tagline, it would be: Small, Craft, and Local.” says Cindy. “Our desire is to always remain fairly small, keep it very craft, and be as local as we can.”

She says she expects their Fairmont pub will have up to a dozen taps of Stumptown brews. It’s possible that the Fairmont location will get some of the small-batch beers that previously were only available at the Davis taproom. It’s also possible that Fairmont will receive some of Stumptown’s canned beer, which before was only sold at Davis. If not those 16-oz. cans, the pub will likely offer Crowlers of fresh beer filled from the ones on tap.

Local response very good

Andrea Fleming, a local Marion County business person and occasional Brilliant Stream correspondent, is very pleased to see this development.

“I’m glad there is a focus to redevelop Merchant Street and that a brewery is a wonderful lynchpin to the overall development plan,” she says. “We are fortunate that Stumptown is taking a chance on Fairmont. The community is gaining not only a cool place to hangout, but also new members of the Fairmont business ecosystem that can hopefully spur future development on the East Side.”

Stumptown Ales one of WV’s best

Stumptown Ales is among the state’s most revered IPA brewers. They were the first West Virginia brewery to really popularize the modern style of juicy-fruity, less-bitter IPAs that have now taken over the IPA market. Opening in Davis in 2015, Stumptown Ales is currently the state’s highest rated brewery on Untappd. Along with IPAs, it produces popular stout, porter, amber, blonde, and Kolsch-style ales. They also make the tasty, thick Smooth-Eez fruited sour series.

Brilliant Stream named Stumptown Ales as West Virginia Brewery of the Year in 2017. They continue to produce small batches of high quality beer.

LINKS
Stumptown Ales Facebook page