Popular Wichita craft brewery is raising a glass this weekend to 10 years of rapid growth
Back in the summer of 2011, Jeremy Horn and Greg Gifford were a couple of home brewers who were ready to take a risk and open their own craft brewery.
They built their first Wichita Brewing Company in an old Play It Again Sports location at 13th and Tyler, and though their focus was on their beer, they also decided they’d serve pizza.
On opening day, there wasn’t much on their minds beyond surviving opening day.
“I don’t know if we ever thought we’d go past opening a west-side brew pub,” said Horn, who was working as a money manager for an insurance company in 2011.
Now, a decade later, WBC has developed so far beyond a single brew pub, and its owners will celebrate their success this weekend with a 10th anniversary bash that will include two nights of partying at two different locations. Friday’s festivities will last from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. at the east-side brew pub, 535 N. Woodlawn, and will continue into the evening with live music from Mountain Deer Revival at the brewery’s venue next door. There will be beer specials all day.
On Saturday, the party moves to the west-side, and the original brew pub at 8815 W. 13th St. will also offer beer specials all day, finishing the celebration with a parking lot party that will include a performance by the band Epic. WBC’s food truck, Hopperoni Express, will be at the party serving pizzas and pastas.
Attendees at the two events will be toasting a local business that has steadily grown over the past decade.
In addition to the east-side brewery, which opened in 2015, the WBC portfolio now also includes a big production facility on the south side of town, where the owners brew and can their beers and ship them to bars and liquor stores in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Wyoming. They’ll add Minnesota and Iowa this year.
WBC also now has that event venue, which opened in 2018 in a 9,000 square-foot former restaurant space at 6160 E. Central. And over the past couple of years, WBC’s owners have taken on a few other side projects, including brewing favorite beers from defunct breweries like Manhattan’s Tallgrass and Wichita’s Aero Plains.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when hand sanitizer was scarce, the brewery also started using one of its tanks to make the stuff, and they’re still doing it. This year, they’ll again provide the hand sanitizer that Wichita Public Schools will use. The brewery also puts on a popular west-to-east relay race every year that starts at one of their brew pubs and ends at the other with a big party.
WBC also in recent years has won several big awards at the Great American Beer Festival, and in 2019, it was recognized by The Brewers Association as one of the country’s 50 fastest growing breweries.
Amid all that, in the brewery’s 10th year of business, owner Horn has taken on another new project: a podcast. Three weeks ago, he debuted the first episode of “Under the Lid,” where he and his head brewer Cody Sherwood invite fellow brewers to swap stories and chat about life and beer. So far, the irreverent podcast — which comes out every Monday — has featured conversations with the owners of River City Brewing Co., Nortons Brewing Company and Hidden Trail Brewing, a new operation in Garden City.
The podcast is available on platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Horn, who was able to leave his former day job to run the brewery full time, says his own life has changed dramatically in the last decade and that he looks forward to the next 10 years.
“Pretty much my entire world and all the people I hang out with now are from WBC at this point, including former employees and regular customers,” he said. “We’ve met a lot of cool people.”
This story was originally published August 4, 2021 at 5:01 AM.
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