Selvedge Brewing is heading west: leaving its space in the Wool Factory complex in Charlottesville’s Woolen Mills neighborhood where it’s been based since it opened in 2020.
“In the Fall of 2023, Selvedge Brewing will expand its brewing operations and move to its own dedicated taproom in the Bellair area just west of Charlottesville,” the brewery announced in a statement on Friday.
That statement was accompanied by renderings of the new taproom and a rough map indicating the brewery’s future home off Ivy Road across the street from the Birdwood Golf Course.
Brandon Wooten, chief brand officer at Selvedge’s parent company Bread & Table, said the business is not prepared yet to share the exact location for fear fans will start showing up before the doors are open.
That new location, he said, is currently being used as a roastery for Selvedge’s sister company Grit Coffee.
“The roastery is eventually moving out of that space into a new space that we’re working on now,” Wooten told The Daily Progress on Friday.
He said Selvedge is aiming to make the transition between the Wool Factory and Bellair locations as seamless as possible — helped in large part by the fact that the Grit roastery already has much of the necessary infrastructure for Selvedge’s brewery operations. Most of the work, he said, will be on the taproom side of things.
“We’re trying to make that gap as small as possible. Until we get into the construction process, we won’t know, but the goal is to have that be as minimal or, if possible, none at all: close one operation and open the other,” Wooten said. “That’s optimistic, but we’re optimistic people.”
Wooten said the decision to leave the Wool Factory, where Bread & Table also has its Broadcloth restaurant and Workshop wine and coffee bar operations, was not because there was too little business at the location. Quite the opposite.
Bread & Table operated the Selvedge space in the 6,000-square-foot main hall at the Wool Factory as both a taproom for the brewery and event space.
As the pandemic has waned and the events industry in Charlottesville has gotten back into full swing, Wooten said they faced a sort of Judgment of Solomon: The taproom could not be open at the same time as events were going on, but events could not go on while the taproom was open.
“It was originally kind of designed as an event space with a brewery built in,” Wooten said. “In the pandemic we were a brewery first,” but when wedding and party reservations started to flood in, “we weren’t able to keep the brewery open as much as we wanted to. … We started to fight about it.”
Instead of splitting the baby in half, Bread & Table found a better solution: Selvedge needed its own dedicated space.
“Part of the reason we’re excited to move Selvedge out is because we had to be so flexible at the Wool Factory,” Wooten said. Because the real estate needed to be able to transition for whatever event a party desired, he said, “we weren’t able to build in some of the amenities and designs for that event space that we wanted.”
TVs were at the top of Wooten’s list.
“We’re honestly just excited to have TVs and be able to watch sports and do all those kinds of thing we’ve really not been able to do,” Wooten said of the future Bellair location.
Back at the Wool Factory, the old Selvedge space will be dedicated solely to events.
“The Wool Factory will not be looking for a new tenant,” Bread & Table spokeswoman Erin Bagnell told The Daily Progress on Friday via email. “Once Selvedge relocates, the main hall at The Wool Factory will be primarily used as an event space.”
Wooten added that Broadcloth and the Workshop spaces will not be affected by the move.
If anything, he said, the Workshop will be more “front and center.”
“Broadcloth will continue to operate as it has,” he said. “We see the Workshop growing more into a destination.”
Since it opened in 2020, Wooten said, Selvedge operated as a “touch point” for those in the area “popping off Rivanna Trail or coming in from Riverview Park” nearby.
The Workshop, Wooten said, can fill that role.
“With Selvedge not being there, we’re excited to explore more things we can offer out of that space,” said Wooten. “We will still have Selvedge beers in the Workshop. People will still be able to get beers there, but it will be a limited supply: three or four taps.”
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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