Craft cidery moving production to Gig Harbor, plans taproom in old Heritage space
Gig Harbor is set to get a new taproom in a familiar location. But it’s not beer that will flow from the taps, but cider.
Locust Cider & Brewing Co. of Woodinville will open a taproom and cidery in the building at 3207 57th Street Ct., which since 2012 has been Heritage Distilling Company’s home base. It is directly adjacent to the The Inn at Gig Harbor.
Brothers Jason and Patrick Spears debuted Locust in 2015 with a joint production facility and taproom in Woodinville. Their style focuses on out-of-the-ordinary fruit ciders with flavors like dark cherry, honey pear, hibiscus and peach ginger.
“Our canning has outgrown our Woodinville space and this new facility will give us the room to grow and the space we need to keep improving quality and variety while also implementing some new technologies that will make us better. It will also house a taproom with a huge year-round heated and covered outdoor seating area and a new food menu,” Spears said in a release.
“We are especially excited to join the tight-knit and welcoming community of Gig Harbor.”
Craft ciders have become a booming business in recent years, buoyed by consumer’s thirst for natural flavors and a less-alcoholic bite. According to Chicago-based Information Resources Inc., hard cider sales totaled $494.4 million, an 11 percent increase, in 2020.
Locust Cider has been part of that boom. In five years, the company has opened 10 other taprooms across Washington state, including one in Tacoma, with more production and five bars in Texas and Colorado.
Moving distillery in June
Spears told The Gateway he hopes to begin the moving process in June, with the taproom opening sometime in July — though he said he would start tomorrow if he could.
“I’m really excited. I’m antsy, I want to do it now,” Spears said.
The business will also look to hire some new workers locally.
“We’re bringing two or three with us and we’re hiring two to five locally,” Spears said. “We’re going to start talking and posting and interviewing in a couple of weeks.”
The move will require bringing some additional equipment in the transition, though details are still being worked out.
“Cider making is basically wine-making, with apples instead of grapes, so most of what we do is fermentation. We have a lot of fermenters and fermenting things that we’ll be bringing out,” Spears said. “Mostly tanks and then canning equipment; it’s going to be the site for our canning plant.
“The operation that Heritage has in place is actually, with the exception of actual distilling equipment, really similar to what we do, so we’ll plop in there pretty quickly,” he added.
Heritage taking production south
Heritage will move its Gig Harbor production to Tumwater, where it moved some production in 2017 and now has more space in conjunction with the distilling and brewing program of South Puget Sound Community College. The company’s warehouse and administrative offices will remain in Gig Harbor.
In a release, Heritage CEO and co-founder Justin Stiefel said his team was “equally excited to hand our flagship distillery location off to Locust Cider, a preeminent cider maker in the Pacific Northwest, and are confident Gig Harbor will accept them with the same enthusiasm that has led to our success over the last 9 years. We are especially proud of what we built out of that location and we know the space will serve Locust well.”
Locust will first move production while renovating the taproom portion of the Gig Harbor space. The company will turn its Woodinville canning line into a small-batch cidery for one-offs and seasonal releases, expand the on-site drinking area there.
The Woodinville company opened a Tacoma taproom in 2018 at 2805 6th Ave. Competition has followed, including Cider + Cedar, Grit City Cider and Tin Hat Cider, all of which opened in the past year.
“We’re not changing anything in Tacoma,” Spears said. “We do have a taproom opening in Olympia later this year too. That’s something that is a project we’ve had in the works for over a year.”
The tricky part at the new Gig Harbor facility will be creating a new place to drink — Heritage has a separate taproom on Harborview Drive.
Spears will lease the building and is looking forward to getting to know the Gig Harbor community. He and his wife Rebecca, Locust’s vice president of marketing, will move to the area with their two young children.
“All of our locations are community-based and it’s in our values,” he said. “We’re all about being a friendly place to be, a place that’s welcoming. All of our taprooms are meant to be extremely welcoming, comfortable places to hang out.”
“Our goal is just to have a solid, long-term, go-to place for the community,”
A drinker’s destination
If all goes as planned, this nook of Gig Harbor will become a veritable drinking destination, as a Tacoma brewery is also in the midst of a build-out down the block. Dunagan Brewing will open an Irish brewpub in the Tanglewood building at 3222 56th St.
Jesse Dunagan, who in 2015 opened the original brewery and taproom in downtown Tacoma with his father Vincent Dunagan, said the family-friendly Gig Harbor restaurant will feature Irish fare and pub burgers, with taps of Dunagan’s house beers and other local breweries, plus cider and mead.
Both Dunagan and Spears anticipate a valuable built-in audience from the neighboring hotel.
“Definitely being close to the hotel is a bonus so we can be an awesome benefit for people that stay there. We can add some value to the hotel,” said Spears.
Meanwhile, the craft beverage scene in Gig Harbor continues to grow. Hop Pharm recently opened at 3216 Judson St., and 7 Seas Brewing moved to a waterfront location at 2905 Harborview Drive.
Kristine Sherred of The News Tribune contributed to this story
This story was originally published April 23, 2021 at 5:30 AM.
