A new brewery is coming to the downtown area, this time to the rapidly growing Government Hill neighborhood.
Breakaway Brewing Company is a cyclist-themed microbrewery and gastropub slated for 1518 E. Grayson St., the same retail strip that houses Folklores Coffee House and Betty’s Battalion, across from Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston’s main gate. Co-owner and head brewer Chris Pal-Freeman anticipates a September or October opening.
Pal-Freeman and his wife, Jean, plan to open with a full brewing system and kitchen inside the 3,360-square-foot space on East Grayson, which will also include outdoor seating. The place will be kid friendly, and dogs will be welcome on the patio, he said.
“I am very much about the old-style public houses,” Pal-Freeman, 52, said. “I want (the brewery) to be hyper-local and involved in the neighborhood … the meeting place, a place where you can go and hang out and meet everybody.”
Expect 12 to 16 taps, said Pal-Freeman, who’s been brewing for more than 20 years in places like Portland, Ore.; Greensboro, N.C.; and Pittsburgh.
“I’ve taken a little bit from every place I’ve been, tweaked my recipes a little bit from everywhere,” said Pal-Freeman, who grew up across the country being in a military family, but considers brewery-crazed Portland home having lived there for 10 years. “Anybody who says they don’t like beer, my response is they haven’t found the right beer. There’s too many options out there.”
Pal-Freeman said to expect his brews to be in the 4-6.5% ABV (alcohol by volume) range, while adding that his IPAs are a little stronger at 7.2% ABV with “a little bit more malt and body to them.”
“I’m not hoppy for hoppy sake, or fruity for fruity sake,” Pal-Freeman said. “Most of my beers are balanced.”
Pal-Freeman, an avid cyclist, said the beers will be named after cycling terms. He emphasized the place will be for everyone—cyclist or not.
He described the menu as “gastropub fare” that will pair with the various beers—”stuff you’re not typically going to find in a brewery, but with a little bit of a Texas twist to them.”
Chris and Jean Pal-Freeman moved to San Antonio five years ago when Jean took a job for an oil and gas company. Breakaway Brewing will be the couple’s first brewery, and they’re doing it alone without an investor or partner.
He said he’s been brewing for 20 years—whether it was brewing 40-gallon batches in Portland, or helping his friend set up his system for a brewpub in Pittsburgh.
He’s also gotten to know local brewers in the five years they’ve lived in San Antonio.
“The brewing community here is every bit as open and welcome as it was in Portland,” he said.
Government Hill is starting to explode with more restaurants and bars slated to open on East Grayson, closer to Broadway, across from the Pearl. In the same area late last year, Dallas developer Encore Multifamily broke ground a 386-unit apartment complex, the first phase of Broadway East, a multi-phased development that’s supposed to rival the Pearl in size.
“There are just so many pockets of San Antonio I think are really untapped,” Pal-Freeman said. “Government Hill is really one of those areas with all of the population and concentration down along the River Walk and Pearl and starting to come up Grayson. Every time I drove pass that building, I thought: This is just a great little neighborhood.”
For Pal-Freeman, the new venture has come full circle. His father was in the U.S. Air Force, and his family was at Lackland Air Force Base when he was 4.
“It just seemed right to be right across from Fort Sam,” he said.
Heron Editor Ben Olivo has been writing about downtown San Antonio since 2008, first for mySA.com, then for the San Antonio Express-News. He co-founded the Heron in 2018, and can be reached at 210-421-3932 | ben@saheron.com | @rbolivo on Twitter
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