A revived 1960s charter bus and a pour-it-yourself wall featuring more than 30 different beers and soda are a few of the things on tap for Friday’s grand opening at Reserve Artisan Ales.
The Galesburg brewery has homemade styles and other craft brews from around the area.
Owners and brothers Blake and Trent Benedict said the idea behind having different options is to keep things fresh so people don’t get tired of the same brews.
“I want to brew a bunch of different styles, maybe even ones that people haven’t tried before,” Blake said. “And then, we can also have styles compliment the ones that I’m brewing. So if I don’t have a red ale on or if I don’t have a West Coast IPA on or something, I can get a local, another local craft brewery to you know, use one of theirs, and it’ll kind of just have the whole gambit of styles on at any given time.”
Aside from the many taste options to choose from, one unique feature at Artisan is a 1960 Peoria charter bus that was brought back to life. The brothers said they found it in a scrap yard when it looked like this:
The bus was refinished and painted, with the old windows replaced by LED screens for the pour-my-beer experience.
“We wanted to do something different and this is what we came up with,” Trent said. “It’s definitely an attraction people come to take a look at and see what we’ve done and at least try to restore some history too.”
An official ribbon cutting for the full Reserve Artisan Ales experience is scheduled for Feb 4.
More information on the brewery can be found here.
