WAITSFIELD – Lawson’s Finest Liquids is one step closer to breaking ground on its Waitsfield brewery after receiving permits from the town’s development review board (DRB) this month.
Lawson’s sought and received conditional use approval for the brewery and tasting room as well as approval for an amendment to the planned unit development permit that runs with the parcel on Carroll Road in Winter Park where the brewery is to be built.
Lawson’s Finest is now waiting on two pending state permits, an Act 250 amendment for the property and wastewater permits. Brewery owners Sean and Karen Lawson hope to take their project out to bid this spring, breaking ground in 2017 and opening the new facility in 2018.
The Lawsons announced last year that they are moving their microbrewery from Warren to Waitsfield where they will open a new and larger brewery with a tasting room and retail sales. Their plan, which they presented to the DRB last month, is to move to Carroll Road in Waitsfield to the property formerly occupied by Valley Rent-All.
In their new facility, they expect to operate a 30 bbl brewery.
The plans call for tearing down the building closest to Carroll Road and rebuilding a tasting room on the same foundation and footprint. The building at the back of the property will have its loading dock revised and gain three silos, two for grain and one for spent grain.
As reconfigured, the brewery will reduce its encroachment on the wetlands that make up parts of the Winter Park development along Carroll Road. The plan also includes creating a new 40-space parking lot to handle overflow parking when the existing 57-space lot (shared by The Big Picture and Wood and Wood) fills up.
There will be a retail and tasting space open seven days a week from noon to 9 p.m. Brewery operations – including deliveries – will take place in the mornings before the retail space opens. The plans call for adding a beer garden space to the retail space as well as a pocket park and additional trees to screen the parking from Route 100. They plan to build a boardwalk to connect to the current Mad River Path boardwalk which runs through the site.
One thing that makes this project possible at this site in Waitsfield is the recent construction of a decentralized wastewater system serving Winter Park. That new system creates enough septic capacity for the new facility which is designed for 4,500 gallons a day. The wastewater from the brewery will be treated twice before it enters the new system. The pretreatment system has a cost of about $1 million and it knocks the strength of the heavy brewery effluent down to domestic strength.
In addition to the pretreatment systems, Lawson’s will be collecting the spent grains for farmers for animal feed. The spent hops and shrub will be captured and sent to a local composting facility and the first rinse water from the tanks will be collected for animal feed. No organic solids will enter the pretreatment system.
Lawson’s Finest was founded eight years ago by Sean Lawson, a longtime home brewer and the director of Mad River Glen’s naturalist program, a title he still holds.
