ID, Please
Carding at the door
Same rule as the bar on West 25th. You have to be 21 or older to come in.
Come back on your 21st
We'll be here. We've been here since 2011.
Same rule as the bar on West 25th. You have to be 21 or older to come in.
We'll be here. We've been here since 2011.
Sam McNulty and Mark Priemer opened their first bar on West 25th in 2005. Six years later, they decided to brew their own. Twenty years in, it's all still on the same block.
Before Market Garden, there was a Belgian beer bar. Then an Italian wine bar. Then a basement cocktail lounge. By the time Sam and Mark decided to build a brewery, they had spent six years learning what the block wanted.
A Belgian and Belgian-style beer bar on West 25th. The opening act. If you knew someone who said they didn't like beer, this was where you started them.
An Italian restaurant next door. "Cento" means one hundred in Italian. There were over a hundred bottles of wine on the list.
A Prohibition-era cocktail lounge tucked into the basement below both. Low ceilings. Stiff pours. The kind of place you accidentally closed down.
The brewpub building had been sitting empty for more than a decade. Before that, it was a poultry slaughterhouse for the West Side Market. Sam and Mark bought it and opened Market Garden Brewery ... a ten-barrel system with twenty-four taps, a pizza oven, and a front porch that became the best seat in Ohio City.
Andy Tveekrem had joined the partnership the year before. We could rest assured that the beer would be great.
By the time the production brewery came online in 2016, we had three brewing systems within a hundred yards of each other on West 25th. Pat Daniels named the footprint the "Beermuda Triangle" and it stuck.
Every beer we make is an experiment before it's a product. Most of them climb all three systems before they ever leave the block.
Our pilot system, opened in 2012. A new beer every week. If it's interesting, it goes on tap there so our regulars can tell us what they think.
If a Nano beer earns its keep, we brew it again at ten times the volume here. Servers and guests live with it for a while before anyone calls it finished.
If it still earns its keep, the beer moves one block over to our Esau & Huber brewhouse from Bavaria and goes out to Ohio in bottles, cans, and kegs.
Andy started at Great Lakes Brewing in 1991, back when Great Lakes was still a brewpub. He was the brewmaster there for nearly a decade and, along the way, pioneered their Christmas Ale. If you like holiday beer in Cleveland, you can thank Andy.
He left for Frederick Brewing in 2000, then joined Dogfish Head at fifteen thousand barrels a year and left when it passed one hundred thousand.
His wife is from Cleveland. When the chance to come home arrived in 2010, he took it. Andy joined the partnership and Market Garden opened its doors a year later.
He insisted on a working lab from day one. Many breweries don't build one until later on, as an afterthought when there are problems. Andy wasn't waiting.
Fries & Schuele was a department store here in the 1800s. In the 90s, Great Lakes Brewing owned the building and Andy installed a thirty-barrel brewhouse in the back before they built the bigger one across the street. Which means Andy was brewing beer in this building twenty years before we showed up to do the same thing.
This building was a poultry slaughterhouse for the West Side Market next door. Then it sat empty for more than a decade. We bought it, renovated it top to bottom, and moved in a ten-barrel brewhouse and a pizza oven. The building went back to feeding the neighborhood. We just changed the menu.
The production brewery sits on what used to be a row of 1840s homes and a street called Gould Court that ran through to where Mitchell's Ice Cream now scoops its patio. When we opened the walls we found an original fireplace and layers of wallpaper from people who lived on this block a hundred and eighty years ago.
The reclaimed wood in the barrel-aging room came from a church that caught fire on the Cleveland Clinic campus. We saved as much of it as we could before the demolition crew arrived. The beer that ages in those barrels is, technically, blessed.
Twenty years of growth fits on one page. The work behind it doesn't. Every tap handle, every can, every room on this block comes from a team of brewers, craftsmen, cooks, bartenders, creatives, marketers and sales reps who show up and care, every single day. The buildings are the bones. These people are the heartbeat.
Ohio City is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Cleveland and one of the most alive. The West Side Market has been here since 1912. We've been next door since 2005. The restaurants, the shops, the people walking their dogs at two in the afternoon on a Wednesday ... this is the neighborhood, and we're part of it.
You can walk to us from the market. You can bike over from Tremont. You can take the train and be here in twenty minutes from downtown. However you get here, you'll find a seat, a cold beer, and a neighborhood that's happy to have you.