Trailway Brewing Opening Location in Uptown Saint John
FREDERICTON — When Jake Saunders, co-owner of Trailway, isn’t brewing beer he is thinking about brewing beer. The self-proclaimed beer nerd started Trailway with his friend Dan Mason in 2014. After acquiring their bowling alley brewery hybrid, The Drome, in 2018, they are ready to open their first location outside Fredericton.
Trailway will serve beer to the city of Saint John in 2022. Their new location is at 143 Union Street, taking the spot previously held by Peel Pub, now First City Brew Pub.
Their target opening date is May or June of next year.
“It’s an extensive renovation,” said Saunders. “We’re probably going to be six-plus months for renovations before we open.”
The new location will offer all the different Trailway brews now found in Fredericton plus a food menu. They expect to brew some beer, like a house brew, on-site in Saint John.
“It’ll be a nice showpiece system,” said Saunders, who plans to install a three-barrel brewing system. “I don’t think it’ll be overly active, we’ll maybe brew on it once or twice a week.”
The Saint John location has a kitchen and enough seating for 50 to 60 patrons. Chris McIntosh, who is currently general manager of The Drome, will be moving to the new location. McIntosh has a background in food and will make up the menu, do the hiring, and manage the operation’s day-to-day in Saint John.
“We are going to put a pretty big emphasis on the food side of it, which is something that we don’t necessarily have at Trailway,” said Saunders.
The new location also has an Airbnb upstairs, which they are in the process of renovating. When not rented out to guests, it will be used by Saunders and his staff.
Saunders, who has extended family in Saint John, is excited to get to spend more time in the city.
“I think it’s great,” said Saunders. “A few years ago, when I went out in uptown Saint John, I came to the realization that the uptown infrastructure is really good.”
He said Trailways already has a solid following in Saint John with a lot of keg accounts.
Trailway brews a lot of different kinds of beer, about half of which are currently exclusive to the Fredericton location and not sold NB Liquor stores. The new location will have all flavours available with cans available for purchase to take away.
“This gives us that option to kind of distribute a lot of that stuff in the city of Saint John,” said Saunders.
When deciding how to grow, Trailway’s plan is to diversify operations. Trailway sells its beer in Nova Scotia and Quebec but isn’t focused exclusively on distribution.
Saunders used their last project, turning the Bowl-a-Drome into The Drome, as an example of this. Their plan was to make bowling appeal to a younger demographic that already frequented breweries. In the months before the pandemic, The Drome was seeing four to five times the sales of the previous owner.
“We’ve introduced bowling to a younger generation by putting our name on it, really pushing the fun of bowling,” said Saunders, who bowls himself every Thursday night.
Saunder’s said he and Dan don’t shy away from big projects like The Drome and the new Saint John location.
“We look at it like, this is going to be fun, let’s do it,” said Saunders. “We get excited about risk.”
Even though he expects it will be stressful going back and forth from Saint John over the next few months, he has a great team to back him up at Trailway. In Fredericton, he said the operation runs seamlessly and that they have hired great staff over the last few years.
Now that everything in Fredericton is up and running, Saunder’s said they are hungry for what is next.
“The fun is watching it grow and watching how the community comes together and really supports it,” said Saunders.
Rachel Smith is an intern with Huddle. Send her story suggestions: [email protected].