On tap: BrewDog planning $6M hotel
Dogs sleep about 14 hours a day.
So, it should be no surprise that Scottish craft brewer BrewDog is going to build itself somewhere to snooze.
The company announced plans Thursday for a hotel at its $30 million brewery and U.S. headquarters in Canal Winchester, which are still being completed.
The hotel, dubbed the DogHouse, would rise beside the newly opened taproom and restaurant, and it also would house the company’s sourbeer production facility.
The project is expected to cost $6 million and could be ready by late 2018.
In classic BrewDog style, the company kicked off a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to raise at least $75,000 from its fans to get the hotel fast-tracked.
The project has one fan for certain.
“We do need hotels,” said Lucas Haire, development director for Canal Winchester. “We’re excited to support (BrewDog’s) growth and see what they have in store.”
The project is in early development stages and will need various approvals before construction can begin.
A hotel on site would help BrewDog with its need to house employees coming from Scotland and to tap into a growing trend of beer tourism, Haire said. Stone Brewing Co., one of BrewDog’s mentors of sorts, is planning a $26 million hotel at its home near San Diego.
If the first week of operation at BrewDog’s Canal Winchester taproom, DogTap, is any indicator, people may flock to the site.
The taproom opened Feb. 20, and BrewDog said the restaurant and craft beer bar had almost 13,000 visitors that week. The visitors enjoyed more than 10,000 pints of its flagship Punk India pale ale and ate 1,400 hamburgers.
BrewDog has been contemplating a hotel project for years, but Scotland was thought to have been the obvious site. A hotel here makes sense, though, given one of the incentives BrewDog received for locating in central Ohio was a 15-year tax abatement.
Rooms in the hotel will overlook the sourbeer brewery, which needs to be separate from the main brewery to avoid product contamination.
The company pitched the hotel as a beer-lover’s paradise.
“Forget Disneyland,” BrewDog said on its fundraising page on Indiegogo. “This is the happiest (hoppiest) place on Earth.”
BrewDog sees the hotel and brewery, plus the DogTap restaurant and bar, as the ultimate destination for its fans looking for a getaway.
“Our brewery in Ellon, Scotland, has become a destination for craft beer fans across Europe and we want to build an
even more amazing beer destination stateside,” the company said in a press release.
As envisioned, the hotel will have a spa offering beer-themed treatments, like a malted barley massage and hop oil pedicures. The rooms will feature refrigerators stocked with BrewDog beers. The hotel project will create about 80 new jobs, according to BrewDog.
The company’s other central Ohio project, a brewpub in Franklinton, is also going forward, according to Keith Bennett, BrewDog’s special projects manager.
BrewDog closed on the property in Franklinton, a former automotive repair garage, on Monday and designs for the space are being drafted. The Franklinton brewpub is expected to open next year.