Kenai River Brewing is planning a new 7,000 square foot location near the “Y” in Soldotna but hopes to keep the “intimate” community feel their current brewery hosts.
Doug Hogue: “We’ll have a nice outdoor seating area on the south side, it’ll be covered and then we’ll have a little bit of open and it’ll be basically in the woods, a really nice natural setting so it should be pretty sweet.”
Doug Hogue is one of three co-owners of the small brewery currently located behind Froso’s in Soldotna.
He said their popularity has outgrown that space.
Hogue: “We are 100% maxed out of that current facility. We put in as many efficiencies as we could over the last couple years but we cannot make anymore beer where we’re at so if we want to continue to grow we really had to add a new location.”
A kitchen is included in the new location’s plans but he said they won’t add food services right away; the increased space will allow them to keep more of their seasonal beers on tap.
Hogue: “We brew a lot of different beer, during the off-season we’ll brew these and we’ll kind of tuck them back away and put them on sporadically but we just don’t have the tap handles to be able to have them on simultaneously so now we’re going to have the ability to be able to be able to roll into more offerings at the brewery and we’ll be able to share a lot of those one-off beers with the rest of the state via growler bars that have become really popular.”
Crews broke ground off of 47th Street behind the new Walgreens last Friday and Hogue said they are hoping to open the new location in May 2016.