It's not hard to find a drink in New Orleans. But getting a beer direct from the source at one of the local breweries now proliferating around our city often means venturing to back streets, dead ends and once-forgotten corners of town.
Beer making is essentially light industrial work. It calls for an industrial setting. Beer drinking is often a social pursuit. And so, the taprooms where these new small brewers now sell pints of their product direct have created a different sort of social space -- luring beer lovers to niches of New Orleans neighborhoods that had not seen much life until lately.
Many of these new New Orleans breweries are found in old warehouses and workshops that now resemble handmade beer halls and DIY beer gardens. Add a counter and beer taps, string up some lights, set out picnic benches and suddenly the settings of concrete slabs and loading docks and storage yards start to feel vibrant and laidback, all at once.
These taprooms function differently from bars. For one, they’re open to all ages. It’s common to see young parents at ease and flocks of kids in flight. Toy boxes and sidewalk chalk are normal taproom amenities. So are food trucks. What you won’t find is any adult beverage, beyond beer, and that’s by law.
All of this is new in the city. When craft breweries first staked their return in Louisiana it was in more rural areas, starting with Abita. The north shore now has its own network of smaller breweries - Covington Brewhouse, Chafunkta Brewing and Gnarly Barley – and Mandeville has a brewpub too, Old Rail Brewing Company, which like the long-running Crescent City Brewhouse in the French Quarter is a full service restaurant.
In the city itself , the new circuit of breweries is different. These are production breweries with taprooms in the mix. And they’ve all found homes deep within old neighborhoods or along their industrial edges.
There’s NOLA Brewing, with a view of the hardworking riverfront of the Irish Channel, and Courtyard Brewing down a side street under the shadow of the Crescent City Connection. Nearby, Urban South is in a sprawling old warehouse off and in Mid-City you’ll find Second Line Brewing by a dead end marked by some rusted out railroad tracks, which might, someday, be an expansion of the Lafitte Greenway bike path.
Just over the parish line in Old Arabi, 40 Arpent Brewing just built a new taproom in an old garage alongside the Mississippi River.
More are on their way with Wayward Owl brewery taking shape in a long-neglected old theater in Central City, with Parleaux Beer Lab coming along near the bottom of the Bywater and with work on a spot called Brieux Carre now underway in the Marigny.
Even at the breweries that are open, there’s a certain work-in-progress, rough-at-the-edges aesthetic. You won’t confuse any of these places with a chain tavern or a new cocktail concept. The ad hoc ambiance, the off-the-beaten-path locations – it all speaks to something new and growing, and for beer lovers in New Orleans there sure is a lot brewing.
6809 N. Peters St, Arabi, 504-444-3972
2115 Decatur St., projected opening: late 2016
1020 Erato St.
3001 Tchoupitoulas St., 504-896-9996
634 Lesseps St., projected opening: early 2017
433 N. Bernadotte St., 504-248-8979
1645 Tchoupitoulas St., 504-267-4852
3940 Thalia St.
