It’s always exciting to have new businesses, and the new foot traffic that it will bring, but I am particularly excited about the location, not just in downtown, but on the south side of downtown because this is an area where we are… gradually expanding the footprint of our downtown area. “… This is a very exciting opportunity with the unveiling of the brewery here in downtown. “The city council is very excited anytime a new project, a new investment (comes) to LaGrange anywhere, but particularly in downtown,” said Mayor Jim Thornton. The brewery has received the support of the city and the Callaway Foundation on the renovation project, which they hope will inject new life into that section of downtown while making use of a building that has long been part of the fabric of the community. The brewery hopes to sell its beers at local restaurants like Brickhouse and Mare Sol, and the founders plan to release some beers to the local area well before those beers premiere elsewhere. “By the time we open in late summer and do our grand opening, we’ll have several more beers available.” “We anticipate having beers in the LaGrange market in approximately a month, and we’ll be unveiling one to two beers initially, and then adding from there,” said co-founder Rob Goldstein. The brewery had several of those beers available to sample at the announcement, and with the help of another local brewery – who is allowing them to use their space while construction continues on the Westbrook building – they hope to have Wild Leap beer available in LaGrange as early as February. “We realized that there were a lot of beers that we wanted to make ourselves, so we started our own business.” “When you work with a company as big as Red Brick (Brewing Company), you can have a lot of ideas for beers and things that you want to do and things that you hear that people like, but it’s not your company, so we just kind of realized over time that we had enough ideas that were just a little bit different from that that we were moving in a different direction,” said Head Brewery and Production Manager Chris Elliot. Red Brick is one of the largest craft breweries in Atlanta, but the Wild Leap team wanted to be able to express their own vision for a brewery, so they decided to move to LaGrange and strike out on their own. Wild Leap is a new brand, but the brewery team has several decades of combined experience creating beers and working with customers at the Red Brick Brewing Company in Atlanta. “Little did we know that the city would embrace our dream of opening a brewery – something that we had talked about for so long.” “I happened to see the coolest looking building on the street as I was riding by, and I remember saying out loud to the person in the car with me, that would be a cool spot for a brewery,” said co-founder Anthony Rodriguez, who has lived in Atlanta for years. Wild Leap Brew Company announced plans to open a craft brewery in the former Westbrook Tire building on Thursday, and the co-founders of the brewery were both excited to be able to use such an interesting piece of architecture in downtown to fulfil their dream of opening their own brewery. LaGRANGE – The annual Craft Beer Festival won’t be the only thing hopping in downtown later this year thanks to the new brewery that is slated to be opened by some of the festival’s founders. Renovations are said to include the addition of an outdoor patio, a tasting room where events can be held and the brewing room where the craft beers will be created. Wild Leap Brew Company is currently in the process of renovating the former Westbrook Tire building for the brewery.
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