A look inside the future Fair Isle Brewing space

The next brewery to claim its place amongst Ballard’s beer-makers is making headway on their 2019 opening, with almost $300,000 raised by investors and the beginning of building out their future home at 936 NW 49th St.

Fair Isle Brewing is taking a highly transparent approach in the building of their business — from the get-go, they’ve provided in-depth information about their business plans. Their crowd-funding investment campaign on NextSeed has been wildly successful so far, with $290,300 raised by 263 investors so far. The campaign target was $200k, which they surpassed weeks ago.

Founders Andrew Pogue and Geoffrey Barker got the keys to the 7,500 square-foot space in early November — they’ve been working on drainage, utility upgrades, demolition and a new floor. Here’s a few photos of the building that will house Fair Isle, as posted in their blog:

Fair Isle will brew mostly farmhouse beer, using local, seasonal ingredients. “Our beers take longer to produce, and so much gets taken off the top with the distribution model that it’s very difficult for us to make any money on the kind of volume we can [produce],” Barker told writer Holly Regan in a recent blog post. “So we’re investing in the tasting room to create [a place] people want to come to, not only for the beer, but because it’s a cool environment.”

The brewery has distribution plans, but the central focus is on the tasting room.

“We’re trying to use our space to tell the whole story of these beers,” Pogue said. “Most consumers, and rightly so, don’t know what a puncheon or a coolship is. So by having a tasting room where you’re drinking your beer, and 20 feet away, there’s the coolship, and there’s the puncheon — then you’re able to complete the story.”

Even with a head-start on building, they still expect to open in the summer of 2019.