The new location at 301 West Grimes Avenue sits one mile south of our current location and is adjacent to the new B-Line Trail and a huge brown-field railroad switchyard that the City of Bloomington has targeted for restoration into a beautiful park sometime in the next decade. The building is a monument to 1960’s era industrialization, as it was built as a warehouse for RCA television sets, back in the day when our town was a national hub of domestic TV production.

This dinosaur building covers 47,000 square feet on 1.8 acres. It has no heating, cooling or insulation, and sports little in the way of internal improvements other than a couple toilets. The water utility servicing the building dates to 1929, and the poles running along its east side were installed for telegraph wires, not even telephones. Needless to say, we have our work cut out for us. Bloomington Mayor Mark Kruzan and the City administration (including economic development, planning, and parks departments) have been very supportive, and the McDoel Gardens neighborhood gave our plans a warm reception.

Of course this vision is subject to regulatory approvals and a herculean amount of work from our team, many of whom already work 55 hours every week. But this extra work will give Caleb and crew the opportunity to lay out the new brewery in a way that optimizes quality and efficiency, and few of us in the craft beer industry ever have the opportunity to start from a blank slate twice.

We hope the community will rally around this redevelopment project and support our move. 11th Street will always be the hub of our retail business, and maybe we’ll use the extra space to start a little distilling operation or some other related venture one of these days.

One final request: while Upland and the other members of the craft beer fraternity have grown a tremendous amount in recent years, we are still a rounding error in the overall beer market of Indiana, where craft beer represents less than 2% of the total market. Growing breweries are very capital intensive, and none of us are yet making much of a financial profit (and nearly all of us re-deploy any profits back into more and better equipment). Please continue to support local breweries and encourage your friends to try our beers, too!

/Signed/

Doug Dayhoff