New brewery aims to tap into Steubenville’s potential
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STEUBENVILLE -- The city is an untapped market for craft beer, and that’s something Andrew Sharples is looking to change.
Sharples is the developer and owner of Oyo Brewing Co., and if the schedule holds, it’s expected that Tri-State Area residents will be able to start enjoying locally made beer and food at the facility being constructed at the corner of South Fourth and Market streets by the first part of August.
“It’s an incredible place,” Sharples said Wednesday while discussing the decision to bring his family to Steubenville. “It’s very tax- and business-friendly.”
Work is underway on the demolition of buildings along Market Street to make room for construction of the production facility and patio area, while remodeling is being done inside the former Richmond Brothers Clothing Store that sits on the corner, he told members of the Steubenville Rotary Club during Wednesday’s meeting at the JeffCo Event Center. When the work is complete, the bottom floor of the building will be a taproom with about 60 seats and a high-top rail along the side facing South Fourth Street.
Upstairs will be a self-service arcade, Sharples said, which will feature old-style games like bubble hockey, Pac-Man and Galaga.
The building’s old stage is being rebuilt, and that will allow ticketed and non-ticketed events to be held and provide a place to enjoy live music when the weather is bad. During regular business hours, he added, the room will be set up with long tables in an open beer hall style.
Equipment that will be used in the brewing process already has been ordered, with a shipment expected to arrive soon.
On the outside of the production building, an enclosed outdoor beer garden will be built, which will have heated areas with couches, tables, picnic tables, umbrellas and a stage where outdoor events can be held.
“One of our biggest things is that we want this to be a family-friendly venue for everybody in the community,” Sharples said. “We haven’t decided exactly what we’re going to fit into the layout, whether it’s sandboxes in addition to cornhole and traditional games. We really want to make sure that parents can have a safe place where they’re not worried about kids running into the street, and their kids can be occupied with live toys and activities as well.”
There will be food available there -- earlier Wednesday, Sharples and Martoni’s Pizza Co. announced a partnership that will make Martoni’s the food-service partner of the brewery. Using the new kitchen that is being built at the building, Martoni’s will be able to offer an expanded menu.
The journey to Steubenville for Sharples and his wife, Audra, was a long one. He grew up just outside of Providence, R.I., and she was from the Seattle area. They met while attending Marquette University in Milwaukee, and they bounced around while she was working as a nurse in the Navy.
They discovered Steubenville while they were looking for a place to raise their family full time, thanks to his brother, who was living in Pittsburgh.
Sharples said they were more interested in investing in commercial real estate in the city than in opening a brewery. They determined that the downtown area, where there were a few buildings that were structurally sound, would have a lot of growth opportunity, especially when they considered the effort that St. Joseph the Worker has put into improving infrastructure.
They looked at the building that once housed Froehlich’s Classic Corner at the intersection of Fifth and Washington streets and thought it would have great potential to become home to a brewery, but that did not pan out, he said. That led them to the corner of Fourth and Market.
Working with older buildings that have been poorly maintained brings a special set of challenges, Sharples said. While the old clothing store building had been rebuilt in 1953 with 20-inch poured concrete and crisscrossing 20-inch I-beams that provide needed structural strength, other buildings in the project area had never been updated, and some contained wooden trusses and smaller I-beams that have become corroded.
That can make demolition of the buildings along Market Street tricky and lead to a situation like what happened earlier this week, when the back of a building that was being torn down collapsed while no one was working at the site.
“We have a great commuter population going to Pittsburgh and Wheeling -- the people are here,” Sharples said. “It’s more or less the infrastructure, especially downtown, where it is difficult, without strategic demolition of these buildings that no longer have those historical characteristics.
“And I would argue that more are just so unsafe,” he continued. “God forbid there was somebody, a homeless person, who was underneath one of those facades or storefronts, or in the back, and who would crawl through the window during a winter storm or something like that. All it takes is one more freeze-thaw, and the whole thing could have come down on a couple of people -- like one did the other day where, luckily, no one was inside.”
Oyo Brewing figures to help bring people into the city, and that, in turn, will spur additional development.
Sharples said while the craft brewing industry is going through a rough period, with downsizing and consolidation, the company finds itself in a great position.
The closest craft brewers on the scale Oyo will offer are in Imperial and Moon Township, he said. You have to go a long way west and north to locate one, and there’s not a similar facility in Wheeling.
“The market here is incredible,” Sharples said. “We have great access to Pittsburgh, throughways going straight to Cleveland, Columbus and Wheeling. The location is perfect and the taxes are great. We have incredible schools. There’s so much momentum with the growth at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, moving down the hill with the dorms and the development at Franciscan Square. And St. Joseph the Worker is doing its multi-block development downtown, bringing new residents who are young and looking to spend out-of-state money, which is the most important thing here, and then employ people in Steubenville.”