Bluewood Brewing (1821 Cherokee) has decided to operate its own kitchen, following a series of guest residencies that included Mac’s Local Eats, Burger 809, and, most recently, B. McArthur’s Neighborhood Taco Shack. The brewery’s new menu puts an emphasis on chicken. Here’s what to know before you go.
The Menu
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After listening to suggestions from regulars and taking stock of what’s already available in the Benton Park neighborhood, Bluewood decided to create a menu built around chicken. “Chicken’s kind of having a renaissance right now,” says co-owner Jerry Moberg.
The menu features seven main dishes, all served with house-made chips or fries. These dishes include a Nashville Hot Chicken featuring a house-made Nashville hot chili oil, chicken & waffles, chicken wings tossed in your choice of seven different sauces, and chicken tacos. Other options include a burger, and there are plans to introduce a black bean version at a later date. The kitchen will also serve up salads in half and full sizes. The current choices include a chicken Caesar salad, a bacon avocado salad, butternut squash, and a quinoa medley.
The microbrewery also continues to offer a wide range of beers, from pale ales to imperial stouts. Flagship beers include the Arch City Haze (a New England IPA), Bananas and Blow (a Bavarian hefeweizen), and Sparkly Bits (a Kolsch named after the two-story chandelier over the bar). The brewery also offers a rotating kettle sour as part of its “Hop Tart” series. It’s currently featuring a fruitier Berliner Weisse with blackberry peaches and cream; the next planned release for the series is a strawberry rhubarb and key lime.
Bluewood also offers a membership program, with such benefits as barrel-aged bottles, discounts, member-exclusive four-packs, members-only glasses, exclusive draft selections, and more.
The Atmosphere
Bluewood Brewing is situated in a massive brick building on Cherokee Street that once housed the horses and wagons of the nearby Lemp Brewery. Decades later, the space was transformed into a restaurant space, providing a home for such past restaurants as The Stable and Table.
The spacious main taproom area offers leather couches, as well as high- and low-top tables, some of which were fashioned from wood in the historic stables. Many of the fixtures are antiques, including a cascading, 19th-century chandelier that inspired the aforementioned Sparkly Bits’ moniker. A secondary seating area doubles as an enclosed patio of sorts, with exposed brick, windows covered in iron grating, and ceiling fans.
Background
Cameron Lund and Grant Lodholz began home-brewing while attending college at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla. The name Bluewood came from a combination of their college houses, Ol’ Blue and Plywood. Co-owner Jerry Moberg joined them at a later date, after befriending Lund over a series of beer releases at other breweries.
Bluewood opened in September 2019. When the brewery moved into its present home on Cherokee Street, the space already had a kitchen, but the owners wanted to focus solely on producing and serving beer. Not wanting to let the kitchen go unused, the owners subleased the space to a number of concepts over the years. “When our most recent partner left…we decided it would just be easier if we took it over,” says Moberg. “By running it ourselves, we’re able to control customer expectations.”
