When Coppertail Brewing Co. started discussing who to team up with on its in-house kitchen, Kent Bailey looked to the place that always left him with good feelings.
Bailey, president of the Ybor City brewery, was familiar with Brandon’s Stein & Vine, the craft beer and wine bar owned by Ty and Lacey Mathis. While trying to learn as much as he could about the beer industry, Bailey first met Ty (the guy who ended up nabbing the first beer, a Free Dive, off the draft system in Coppertail’s tasting room) in 2013, after the Stein & Vine had recently opened.
“You can really tell when you walk in this is a good place, like somebody who cares about beer, somebody who cares about food, somebody who cares about creating their atmosphere, putting together a good team, too, when you talk to the people there,” Bailey said. “It always filled me with good feelings, and so I would go back.”
He proposed the kitchen collaboration to the husband-and-wife duo about a year ago, but nothing was set in stone. The busy trio would talk a little, disappear for couple months, then get together to talk a little more. Their partnership has really taken off within the last two or three months.
Funny enough, Ty was also the person who told Bailey to reserve some room for a kitchen during the brewery’s buildout, though a kitchen seemed impossible at the beginning.
As Bailey tells it, “we were just stretching the budget to open this place,” but within a year, year and half, Coppertail, whose tasting room opened in 2015, began to seriously consider the idea. He says Ty’s advice was some of the best they received.
“I told him, ‘Make sure you leave a space for a kitchen,’” Ty recalled. “Not for me, but I said, ‘In the future, you’re gonna want to have the space for a kitchen’ — just for you, your own prep, whatever. If you have parties, you’re gonna want to have that room, which I was very pleased to see.”
While the Mathises scoped out places for a second location before their conversation with Bailey began, Coppertail has that laid-back neighborhood vibe similar to the Stein & Vine, according to Lacey. She says she thinks recreating that environment is where they’ve run into obstacles.
“You walk in and it’s comfortable. You feel like you’re walking into a neighborhood place that you can sit down and have a conversation, and that’s what we wanted to create,” Lacey said. “Finding a second location, this is a perfect opportunity for us to do that.”
The on-site kitchen, called S&V Kitchen at Coppertail, will allow the brewery to provide more consistency to customers, some of whom have been asking for reliable food options for a while. Bailey says they’ve had a hard time getting food trucks to show up on time and on the days they’re scheduled for.
Additional benefits the partners foresee: S&V Kitchen will give patrons who would’ve left to grab a bite to eat after a couple beers a reason to stay, and prevent them from getting “completely shmammered,” as Ty puts it.
“When they come in and have food options, especially during lunch, you can keep somebody here for a lot longer if they nibble on something and then have a beer or two. Leaving and going somewhere else to eat, you just never see that customer again that day,” he said. “So it works out for both of us to keep the customer here longer and actually put some food in ’em.”
Larger than the Stein & Vine’s flagship kitchen but no more than 1,000 square feet, S&V Kitchen, located to the left of the bar, is set to showcase the chef-inspired-meets-pub flair that the Stein & Vine has become known for. Expect tried-and-true recipes that Lacey and Ty know sell — and sell well — along with dishes that call for Coppertail brews. The plan is to start with a small menu of core eats, building up to a rotating lineup and daily specials, just as they did in Brandon.
The couple was mum about specific dishes. But there’s one item they know they’ll have for sure.
“Pretzels,” Lacey said, noting that the nice part about pretzels is they can use beer to create cheese, mustard, dipping sauces. “That’s the only thing [Kent’s] demanding, and I’m going to say, ‘demand.’”
“I love, I love a good pretzel,” Bailey said.
As they do with beer, customers will order food at the bar, which Bailey says maintains that feeling of a brewery. But the trio is also exploring the idea of food runners to keep the kitchen service-oriented and patrons more comfortable. Ty says a runner will ensure the food is presented right, too, since porcelain plates and silverware are planned, not checkered basket liner or plastic.
“It’s a little less of a guessing game for the consumer, it’s a little more relaxed. I just think that that’s gonna be a little bit different than what some of the other places that opened are doing,” Lacey said.
In recent months, Tampa Bay has seen a couple of local breweries open up their own kitchens. Brew Bus launched the casual Eatery back in November inside its Seminole Heights digs, and The Raven, a gastropub-brewery fusion that Barley Mow is involved with, will kick off a four-day grand opening in Largo on Feb. 8. Do the partners think breweries with in-house kitchens will become more prevalent around town?
“It should be. It’s a great blend. Beer goes with food, food goes with beer. I mean, beer is food,” Ty said. “When someone comes in and has a beer in your brewery, if you have food or something to offer them to eat, to munch on, they will stay up to an hour, hour and a half longer in your establishment. So why wouldn’t you want to do that?”
Added Lacey: “I think it creates that opportunity for us to be even more of a destination as well. When you’re thinking about going out with a group of people — everybody wants to eat, everybody wants to drink — you have a better option.”
Kitchens could even be a way for breweries to stand out as more continue to debut locally. Bailey says he’s heard rumblings, nothing definite, about others that are looking into the addition of food to enhance their customer experience.
“Of course we’re all a friendly brewery community, we all help each other. But in a real sense, we’re also all competing for that person who’s going out that day or night and saying, ‘I want to go drink a beer somewhere — where should I go?’”
They’re anticipating a sometime-in-spring opening for S&V Kitchen at Coppertail. They’d like to do a limited pop-up tasting as a preview beforehand, but need to be sure they have the capabilities to do so — including equipment and licensing, among other things.
“They think about the beer, they think about wine. They think about how those flavors pair up,” Bailey said of Ty and Lacey. “That level of thought, and that kind of level of food, is what I want to have beside our beer because I feel like we’re always trying to push our beer as high as we can.”
This article appears in Feb 9-16, 2017.