Three Tigers Brewing reopening in former Granville fire house

There’s a lot of size comparisons to be me made between the old Three Tigers Brewing space and its new home.

The one that most succinctly captures that change: the new walk-in cooler.

“That space alone is bigger than the entire brewing area (at the previous location),” co-owner Scott Wilkins said.

The Granville brewery and its Mai Chau Kitchen restaurant will celebrate their grand reopening April 1 in a new 6,000-square-foot space at 133 N. Prospect St. in the Licking County downtown.

The move wasn’t a far one.

Wilkins, along with partners Lonnie Hill and Rick Moller, opened Three Tigers in 2016 at 140 N. Prospect, which is right across the street from its new home and next door to Mai Chau, the restaurant Wilkins and his wife Ashley opened in 2015.

Both operations are under one roof now in a former fire house.

“We were bursting at the seams,” Wilkins said of the old space. “We couldn’t keep up with production, which means we couldn’t package, we couldn’t sell to others.”

“We looked across the street longingly,” Wilkins said of the fire house, which had been slated to move. “We hoped we’d be in a good position to move when the time came.”  

They were.

Since the station was a village property, the brewery and restaurant had to go through a public process to take it over, ultimately winning the space over two other proposals.

That decision was made in December 2020. Work on the space began last spring.

The operation more than doubled in size with the move. The improved layout has created even more freedom than before. The kitchen is four times larger, the brewery has quadrupled in size and the taproom doubled.

“The previous kitchen was the size of a food truck-and-a-half,” Wilkins said.

The menu expanded accordingly. All the Mai Chau favorites are still there, including steamed buns, banh mi, dumplings and other Vietnamese inspired foods. But they’ve been joined by wings, mussels, an expanded assortment of burgers and sandwiches and even a few entrees including a short rib, Thai curry fish and a sambal cream fettuccine.

“It’s an awesome, well rounded menu,” he said.

Three Tigers increased employment from 25 to 42 with the new, larger location.

“And we’re still looking,” Wilkins said.

The brewery upgraded to a 10-barrel system with six 10-barrel fermentation tanks, one 20-barrel tank and two 10-barrel brite tanks.

That equates not just to more volume, but also more variety.

The previous, smaller system couldn’t do some styles, like big imperial stouts, well. The added tank space will allow Three Tigers to start making lagers too. Lagers require more time in tanks than ales so many small breweries avoid that whole realm of beers because they cannot dedicate the tank space.

Three Tigers has the space to start a barrel-aging program now as well.

Wilkins said the brewery will begin to package more beer – it does have a canning line — so it’ll sell more beer outside its walls, but not aggressively so. The plan is to identify a handful of bars, restaurants and bottle shops in the Columbus area.

The bulk of the packaged beer will be sold on-site.

“We want people to come here to see us,” Wilkins said. “We think we’ve built something to be proud of.”