With an eye to meeting the growing demand for unique places to enjoy food and drinks, Southernside and Double Stamp owner Nate Tomforde is using those two establishments as the core of a new local brewery group, Crafted Community Concepts.
Restaurant groups have been common in the food and beverage industry, and Tomforde says the same rationales that make sense for restaurants also apply to breweries.
“You can pool resources and talent and staff, spread out costs and collectively grow,” he says.
Sharing a vision
Tomforde says being in the craft beer industry for 10 years, he has seen how the camaraderie and atmosphere unique to breweries has played an important role in Greenville’s growing attraction as a place for people to live, work and play.
“I’m a businessman who loves craft beer,” Tomforde says. “For me, the creativity is I like doing different concepts and breweries are just the ways I’m expressing my creativity.”
Just as a restaurant group may have several different concepts under one umbrella, each of his breweries offers a unique experience in the world of craft beer, he says.
“Each of my breweries have a completely different focus in some ways,” he says. “They’re all community-based. We want to make a good product but they’re all unique.”
That vision of offering a variety of unique experiences is something that has changed from the early days of the craft beer boom. Tomforde says back then, brewers were more focused on making good beer and not necessarily on setting up shop in a convenient location.
Such operations devoted more space to production and less space for taprooms where customers could enjoy the product. With the proliferation of craft breweries in recent years, those calculations have reversed, Tomforde explains.
“You can’t just have good product anymore,” he says. “You really have to create an environment that is unique.”
Now, he adds, people want a place where they can congregate and enjoy a shared experience. That means brewers have to pay attention to where people want to be and locate accordingly.
Location, location, location
One of the places that has become a powerful people magnet is the Prisma Swamp Rabbit Trail, and Tomforde says this was a key consideration in choosing the location for Southernside Brewing Company.
The brewery is immediately adjacent to the trail and on the perimeter of Unity Park. Tomforde says the community focus of the property is right there in the name and reflects the brewery’s role in being a hub for a revitalized and vibrant Southernside neighborhood.
Regional general manager Tim Campau says that sense of community infuses the attitudes of the 27 employees who staff Southernside and Double Stamp.
“I’ve been working in restaurants for more than 20 years,” Campau says. “I’ve never worked in places that have such a positive vibe. The big thing we push is positivity here. You don’t have to be perfect, but positive.”
New horizons
That sense of community and a shared experience is a guiding principle in Tomforde’s other projects.
“I would say here and at Double Stamp it is about the collective environment and space,” he says.
Double Stamp’s location at Holland Park on Laurens Road is as much defined by being part of that emerging community of businesses as the brewery’s pervasive ‘90s theme.
Tomforde explains that while Double Stamp is geared more toward production with an eye to distributing the beers it produces statewide, like Southernside, it is also meant to be a place of gathering and connection.
Two other projects — a 5,000-square-foot brewery in Mauldin’s BridgeWay Station and another brewery planned for The Mill in Fountain Inn — are expected to take shape in 2022. Tomforde says the same attention to space and community will guide those projects.
“It’s a collective effort and a vision,” he says. “My vision is to always interweave with the DNA of the city.”
