The purchase and complete renovation of the nearby warehouse provides the owners with long-needed space to exponentially expand their craft brewing operation and make customer-centered improvements at the pizzeria, Lisa Zwanzig said.
The new warehouse once was the Sapps Bakery building — and later a furniture warehouse. It is being transformed into a modern and stylish craft brewery encompassing 11,000-square fee.
It will allow ZwanzigZ to brew up to 15 times more beer than the current configuration on Lafayette Avenue — 800 barrels a year — while still maintaining the ability to produce small, unique batches of beer, Kurt Zwanzig said.
The renovated warehouse will now be ZwanzigZ headquarters, a production brewing facility and a location for a tasting room and special-event space.
The new warehouse features a 1,000-square-foot walk-in cooler, which is surrounded by windows, an unusual feature, plus hundreds of beer kegs, an automated keg cleaning machine and significantly more brewing equipment.
It’s significant to note that the walk-in cooler for the brewery is substantially larger than the very first ZwanzigZ restaurant, which started out in about 200 square feet in 2002 as a one-room pizzeria on the edge of Columbus.
“It’s kind of fun to measure your growth in the size of a walk-in cooler,” Kurt Zwanzig said.