Jim Fair
The Blue Ridge Brewing Company restaurant will be at 306 Trade Street featuring rooftop dining. The brewery will be in a separate building next door.
Jim Fair
The brewery of the Blue Ridge Brewing Company will be located next door to the restaurant.
Jim Fair
The inside of the Blue Ridge restaurant is close to being ready, according to owner Bob Hiller.
Workers repair the ceiling outside the restaurant.
“I don’t like opening restaurants in winter and the Greer rooftop is so important to us we feel pretty confident that we can be open in the first or second week of April,” Hiller told GreerToday.com.
The rooftop outdoor dining is the only facility of its kind in Greer. “We did a good bit of work upstairs over the summer,” Hiller said.
The scheduled opening will coincide with Greer’s festival season beginning with Family Fest, scheduled May 6-7. “We expect to have all our licenses well before our planned opening,” Hiller said.
Blue Ridge has all but completed the restaurant portion of its building at 308 Trade Street, according to Hiller. He said work will begin in the first of the year to build the brewery in the building he owns next door. “We’ve always owned that building and planned to put the brewery there all along,” he said.
The brewery will supply beer for its restaurant, which would not brew on its premises. The copper tanks will be a focus point in the storefront windows.
Hiller said the brewery, within the law, will sell kegs through a third party distributor.
The Greer restaurant will mirror Greenville’s. “It will be the same setup and same menu,” Hiller said. The décor, graphics and beer names all reference outdoor adventures.
The Blue Ridge Brewery takes on added significance and urgency in the first of the year with Hiller’s signature brewpub on N. Main Street in downtown Greenville closing when its lease expires at the end of this year. “I have my sites on a couple other areas downtown,” he said. “I’m not ready to leave Greenville yet.”
Hiller is credited with the first brewpub to feature craft beer in downtown Greenville in 1995. He is also mentioned as an impetus to the city’s economic redevelopment.
“I will be out of a job in January, so (Greer) can expect to see a lot of us working over there,” Hiller said.