Last week, owners Paul and Nancy Lumbye bought three 31-gallon fermenters, a brite tank and the other equipment they'll need to fulfill Paul's dream of becoming a professional brewer; an attorney by trade, Paul has been home brewing for ten years.
"It took a lot longer than I thought," says Paul, who went into business first with a regular liquor license before switching it to brewpub license.
Now that he has the equipment, his plan -- pending approval from the city and his landlord -- is to set it up out back in a small patio area tucked between Uptown Brothers and an apartment building. If all goes well, he'll start brewing outdoors in June.
"You can tell from my menu that I like IPAs," he says, adding that he hopes to start with a Belgian IPA, a subtly smoked porter and a dortmunder lager. Paul has won a home brewing medal for that last beer, as well as an IPA he made.
Uptown currently has 32 beers on tap -- including several hard to find beers like Russian River Blind Pig and Mad River Steelhead 2IPA -- and sixty or so in bottles. When he starts brewing, however, he plans to add ten more taps: five for his own stuff.In August, Paul addressed customer questions about how he could call his place a brewing company when he wasn't actually making any beer, and whether that was misleading.
"Brewing my own beer is the ONLY reason I am in the restaurant business," he wrote on the Uptown blog. "I had ZERO desire to run a restaurant, outside of that restaurant providing me the only realistic opportunity available to me, a 56 year old home brewing attorney with no commercial brewing experience, to brew my beer on a commercial basis."
