This new craft brewery is Hialeah’s latest cool-kid hangout. Now your tío is a hipster
Hialeah keeps working on its cool factor.
Unbranded Brewing, a project four years in the works, has opened a massive new craft beer brewery and tasting room in east Hialeah. The brewery — the hipster porkpie hat of any up-and-coming new area — takes over a 32,000 square-foot warehouse that sat empty for seven years in a district that has gone from Jewish garment makers and manufacturing over the decades to one eager to rebrand itself an up-and-coming arts district.
Unbranded’s sleek tasting room, colorful murals and spot along the Tri-Rail tracks goes a long way to making this corner of the city a funky new destination.
“We want to be Hialeah,” co-founder and head brewer Lance Aschliman said. “We want to be part of this community and collaborate with everyone in it.”
If opening a brewery in Hialeah seems against the grain, that’s by design, said the business’ principal investor and co-founder Zachary Swanson.
Swanson comes from a long line of rule breakers. He is a descendant of Texas politician and land magnate Samuel Augustus Maverick, who famously refused to brand his cattle so that any unbranded cow was dubbed a maverick. The term evolved to mean someone who shows a stubborn or independent streak. And Unbranded got its name.
“You look up ‘maverick’ in the dictionary and there’s literally a picture of my great-great-great-great grandfather,” Swanson said.
Swanson and Aschliman met as doctoral philosophy students at the University of Miami and bonded over home-brewing beers. They originally thought about opening a small brew pub, but their ambitions grew as they saw how much space they could buy in Hialeah for a brewery.
“We wanted to do something significant,” Swanson said. “We started looking for larger and larger spaces, and it just kept growing.”
The brewing techniques will take on their maverick philosophy.
To distinguish itself from other South Florida breweries, which have boomed in the last decade, Unbranded will focus on wood-aged lagers.
Crisp, cold-fermented lagers are popular in hot climates like South Florida, but Unbranded goes one step further. The beers are aged with oak logs, imbuing the beers with a smoky, woodsy flavor.
They will wood-age beers with hickory, mesquite and other Texas wood — which they hope to pair with east Texas barbecue in the coming months.
Meanwhile, they will have food trucks to go with a stable of 16 beers on tap, including a hazy India pale ale and a guava-wheat beer that’s on-brand for their new location. And they plan to introduce a beer a week from more than 60 different kinds of beer they have produced, sometimes in collaboration with other Florida breweries, as they built out their brewery in the last four years.
This isn’t Hialeah’s first brewery. The Hialeah Brewing Company opened South Florida’s first brewery in 1934 on Palm Avenue and Sixth Street, according to a story in Miami Herald archives, brewing Jockey Club beer. It was later owned by the man who founded burger chain Royal Castle, William D. Singer, but it folded in 1936.
Swanson and his partners build on that Hialeah history. They bought the empty warehouse in March of 2016 for $3 million, according to property records, and they have easily spent an equal amount building a brewery capable of brewing on a large scale, commercially, with Portland-made equipment.
They join a hopeful renaissance in this neighborhood, which passed an ordinance to allow for live-work spaces and invited artist to paint murals and graffiti in the area — although artists have yet to take up residence in the Leah Arts District.
But just the mention of the brewery encouraged Miami restaurateur Matt Kusher to purchase and renovate Stephen’s Deli, which has been open in this warehouse district since 1954.
And Swanson thinks Unbranded’s opening will only encourage Hialeah residents to discover something new and cool in their own city.
“The people of Hialeah have a lot of civic pride,” Swanson said. “You have a quarter million people looking for something to do. We wanted to be an anchor for this district.”
Unbranded Brewing
Address: 1395 E 11th Ave., Hialeah
Hours: Wednesday through Friday, 4 p.m. to midnight. Saturday and Sunday, noon to midnight
More info: 786-332-3097, UnbrandedBrewing.com
This story was originally published February 27, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
