Our Story

Urban Artifact opened in 2015 inside an 1876 church in Northside, a Catholic parish for something over a century before we got the keys. We call it the Fruit Castle, which suits the place better than anything with the word repurposed in it, and suits our explorers and cartographers better besides. The pews are gone. Some of the stained glass is not, and on a bright afternoon it still throws colour across the floor in a way no lighting designer would have the nerve to propose. The building now holds a brewery, a taproom, a music venue, a reception hall and a radio station, which is more jobs than most buildings are ever asked to do.

What we make here is the Fruit Tart, a style we named because nothing in the vocabulary we had described it. It is built so that the fruit is the subject and every other decision in the recipe agrees to help. Gadget, the flagship, carries about sixteen real blackberries and raspberries in a can, which is a number we can give you because somebody sat down and counted them.

More than a million pounds of fruit come through this building in a year. A little of it grows on the property, all of it is processed here, and the colour in the glass is the colour of the fruit, because we have never found another route to that colour that we were willing to take.

The approach has put us in some rooms we did not expect to be standing in. Men’s Journal named Gadget one of the fifty best beers in the world, on a list that also carried Rodenbach and Cantillon. There is a Double Gold from the Tasting Alliance in San Francisco and a Gold from the US Open Beer Championship, and a medal from the China International Beer Competition that made us the only American brewery, and as far as anyone told us the only Western one, to win there. Twenty odd international medals altogether, none of which arrived because we were clever about it. They arrived because somebody counted the berries.

We make beer for people who already love beer, for people who do not, and for people who would frankly rather be holding a cocktail. The lineup moves around a good deal. The standard underneath it holds still, which is that everything starts with real fruit and ends in a glass that tastes like the fruit on the can.

The label art comes from inside the building. The capybaras, the explorers, the small strange countries on the side of a four pack, all of it is drawn by the same hands that make the beer, or at minimum by hands that eat lunch at the same table.

We built this for the curious. People who notice when a strawberry drink has plainly never met a strawberry, who read the back of the can, who have opinions about flavour and are pleased when somebody asks. If you are in Cincinnati, come see the Fruit Castle. The taproom runs Tuesday through Sunday, there is usually something pouring that never leaves the property, and somebody behind the bar will explain the whole density scale to you whether or not you asked for it.