Press Release: 

(Charlottesville, VA) – South Street Brewery owners Fred Greenewalt and Jacque Landry have announced they will be bringing the South Street (Charlottesville’s oldest brewery) brand of beers to retail markets in the central Virginia area beginning in March. “Finally!” said co-owner Jacque Landry. “A long-in-development collaboration with Blue Mountain Brewery is enabling the project to be realized.”

“Taylor Smack (master brewer and co-owner of Blue Mountain) was our brewer at South Street for five years until he opened Blue Mountain in 2007, so it was really the only relationship we pursued,” said Landry. South Street Brewery, a brewpub off the downtown pedestrian mall in Charlottesville, is land-locked as far as onsite expansion, and building an offsite production facility “was not much of an option,” said co-owner Fred Greenewalt. Greenewalt elaborated that South Street’s identity has been and will be as a small, local brewery where customers have been gathering since 1998. “We’ve considered the fact that our reach as a brewery had a lot more potential, but never pursued it,” added Greenewalt, noting that South Street often attended beer festivals around the state in the mid-2000s and has a large base of visitors to the brewery restaurant who travel to Charlottesville for UVA-related events or general tourism.

“It’s another dream come true for me,” said Blue Mountain Brewery’s Taylor Smack. “I feel like my career is coming full circle in an important way. Many people helped me get into the brewing industry, but one person more than any other, and that’s Jacque. Having come from Oasis Brewery (Boulder, CO) and then Great Divide Brewing Company (Denver, CO), Jacque is a wealth of craft-brewing knowledge. He took me on as an intern in late ’99 before I headed off to Siebel Institute in Chicago for brewing school.” From there, Smack became the Head Brewer of the Goose Island brewpubs in Chicago, before returning home in late 2001 after an offer to become South Street’s brewer. In 2006, Smack left South Street to found Blue Mountain Brewery in Afton, and then Blue Mountain Barrel House in 2012.

“Our new production facility (the Barrel House) is what’s making this all possible,” said Smack. “So I find myself crunching recipe numbers over South Street’s beers with Jacque, and it’s like deja vu. I was the steward of these great recipes Jacque created for a significant part of my brewing career, and to be able to brew them again is a little bit like coming home.”

“Having your beers brewed at another facility is not always an appealing venture for a brewer,” said Landry, “but this doesn’t feel like that at all. It’s like we woke up one morning to find a 30-barrel system we could suddenly use, and Taylor and his team are up there brewing. There’s really no one else who understands our beers so well.”

South Street is releasing their Satan’s Pony Amber Ale and J.P. Ale on draft in Central Virginia in March, with a release of these same beers in 12oz bottles in six-pack format in early April. “Seeing our beers on tap in restaurants around Charlottesville and central Virginia, and in grocery stores, etc. will mean a lot,” said Greenewalt. “It’s been a long time coming.”

J.P. Ale–an American Pale Ale with a name echoing Charlottesville’s well-known Jefferson Park Avenue, or “JPA” to the locals, became the first Pale Ale from Virginia to take home a Gold Award at the World Beer Cup, which it garnered in 2000. It remains the only American-style Pale Ale in Virginia to earn the Gold Award at the competition, known as “the Olympics of Beer.”

All South Street beers will be distributed through South Street Brewery’s wholesale partner, Virginia Eagle Distributing Company, also based in Charlottesville.