As a local business, we love to support our local companies and start-ups. It doesn’t hurt when they’re homegrown within the A-LINE team -- and it’s craft beer. As you know, we take beverages, both hot and cold very seriously.
We’d like to congratulate fellow A-LINEr Nicole Cendrowski and her husband, Brian, on their momentum with opening Fireforge Crafted Beer, a small brewery and tasting room opening in downtown Greenville, SC.
Along with some recent press as one of the Upstate’s highly anticipated watering holes opening in 2018, we took a few minutes with Nicole to get up to speed on progress:
When are ya’ll opening?
Haha…that’s the big question right now! Our goal is to open later this spring. Construction is going really well for both our space, a 4,500-square-foot warehouse a few blocks off Main Street, and the overall up-fit of the property itself. The past several weeks we’ve been working on several tasting room design projects with a variety of re-purposed and antique building materials. In a few weeks, our contractors will come back in to finish lighting and plumbing.
What will you have on tap?
Ideally, on opening day we’ll have several of our beers ready to go. I won’t share what the first few will be – we’d like to keep that a surprise. We’ll serve both ales and lagers, as well as be inspired by seasonal influences.
Once building utilities have been upgraded and our 7-barrel brewhouse installation is completed, we can begin brewing test batches. We had the brew system delivered right before Christmas – we didn’t realize we’d been so well-behaved to receive such a gift!
What else will be going on at Fireforge?
While we’re brewing and serving our beer on site, eventually we’ll also have an outdoor beer garden, room for games, events and music. We’ve always loved the laid-back, community-driven brewery and tasting room experiences among other brewers locally and regionally, and hope that ours is as welcoming and fun in its own unique way.
How do you balance opening a new company with everything else?
Not very gracefully. In each day there’s a harmonizing of tasks and commitments within both A-LINE, Fireforge, and other professional and personal responsibilities. Launching Fireforge is like managing the biggest project ever.
I appreciate y’all’s excitement and encouragement along the way. It’ll be so cool to pour beers for the A-LINE crew at the Forge. Let me know when we need to book a big client appreciation party…!
