Craft Kaleidoscope
Find your next favorite brew with our colorful guide to Stark County’s craft beers, organized by style.
Find your next favorite brew with our colorful guide to Stark County’s craft beers, organized by style.
The exploding popularity of craft beers has forced many local bar-restaurants and nightspots to widely expand their selection of crafts, including beers from area breweries. We checked in with 10 area spots to find out which area-brewed beers are popular with their customers.
We have been homebrewers for the past 10 years. While traveling out West for our jobs, we saw the trend and positive impact that craft breweries had on their communities. The original plans were for our brewery to be in the old 1800’s T-Barn on our family farm in Minerva.
The brewery has grown a good bit since starting on Labor Day in 2014. We went from a glorified homebrew setup that could brew about 10 gallons of beer at a time and brewing on that three times a day, four to five days a week, to installing our current brewery which is a Deutsche Beverage Technology 15-barrel system.
My girlfriend introduced me to homebrewing in 2009, and I have been playing with the idea of starting a brewing company for several years. I decided to start the long journey in 2014 and started working with SCORE in Cincinnati. In 2016, I decided to move, as I felt that there was a better opportunity to expand the independent craft brew market in Canton.
Shale Brewing Co. started out of a passion for easy drinking brews shared by co-workers who started homebrewing together. That passion grew to starting a nano-scale brewery turning out batches of Roughneck Red one keg at a time. As demand grew, it was clear bigger equipment was needed to keep up. Partnering with a local brewery to produce some larger batches, Shale began the work of building out its production facility.
Royal Docks Brewing Co. was founded in 2014 and opened its taproom, brewery and kitchen in Jackson Township in September 2015. In 2016, it began distributing beer on draft, and in May 2017, RDB became the first Stark County brewery to release beer in cans—Tanglefoot IPA, Pendragon RareWit and Yardarm IPA.
Before 2014 when Canton Brewing Co. came back to life, Canton was the second largest city in Ohio without a brewery. The space on Third Street and Market N is based on the history of the five breweries that were in Canton before Prohibition. They drank Canton Brewing Co. beer the night professional football was founded in Canton.
Maize Valley Brewery is one of about 244 craft breweries in Ohio, according to the Ohio Craft Brewers Association. The brewery, coming on the heels of a successful winery, opened Labor Day weekend 2014. Brewmaster Jake Turner has been at the helm from the start.
Jake Turner fills a glass from a tap near the bottom of a large silver tank, holds up the liquid for inspection and takes a sip. He nods, satisfied.