INDIANAPOLIS — A Taproom, located on North Delaware Street next to Goose the Market on the city's near north side recently opened, and the name of the spot, is as literal as it gets.
"When we came up with the name it was more of, we're just a taproom, we're the host of someone else,” Xavier Randall, owner of A Taproom said. "Every month we wanted to host a different brewery that had little presence in Indy or none in the state at all."
Randall said the concept is new and something he has never seen. Along with the beer line-up from the featured brewery, they will also sell the brewery’s merchandise like t-shirts and glassware.
Throughout the month of April, Bare Hands Brewery beers will be on tap. The Brewery is out of Granger, Indiana.
Beer and merchandise aren’t the only things rotating through the new business. Upon walking into the beer bar, you’ll find work from local artist Luke Lofland hanging on the walls. Lofland, the first artist to have his work featured, was grateful for the chance to display his pieces.
"It's kind of cool to see these keystones in communities, like pubs, restaurants and cafes that are willing to have artists come in and like give us a place to show our work so people can see it since the places we normally go aren't really happening right now until we start getting those immunities up,” Lofland said. "It's interesting that galleries and places that show art may not have survived, but beer has."
While beer may have survived the pandemic, opening a beer based business still came with some challenges.
"The biggest challenge has been from the permitting side of things,” Randall explained. "With most of the people in government based jobs working from home everything just took that much longer. So getting in with ATC, getting in with the health department, getting in with anything and everything we have to do in order to get all our permitting and licenses to be open went from a month, two months to three months, four months."
However, Randall said there were some benefits to opening his dream business during this time. Smaller capacity restrictions in Marion County gave him the chance to fine tune the experience for customers.
"It kind of gave us an opportunity to see a smaller first impact so we could get our procedures down and operations and everything like that so it wasn't quite as overwhelming knowing we were going to a smaller percentage of occupancy,” Randall said.
Click hereto learn more about A Taproom.
