Lexington’s suds-lovers can soothe their Craft Beer Week hangovers with some hair-of-the-dog news: A new player will join the scene this summer when Mirror Twin Brewing Co. opens the doors to its brewpub on National Avenue in the expanding Warehouse Block neighborhood on the city’s near east side.
“How often do you get the chance to take something that you love doing and make a career out of it?” said co-founder and brewmaster Derek DeFranco, a veteran of Alltech and Blue Stallion brewing operations.
A Kickstarter campaign is getting the word out and, if successful, will ease some costs, though DeFranco and his partners hope to be up and running by late July regardless of the fundraiser’s outcome.
Mirror Twin is remodeling a 4,050-square-foot space at 725 National Ave., with Rebecca Burnworth of Burnworth Design as architect. The brewpub is set to arrive with a unique brewing and presentation concept, and paired with the second brick-and-mortar spot for the popular pizza food truck Rolling Oven.
DeFranco, a native of Belleville, Illinois, near St. Louis, is a “mirror twin” — that is, he is right-handed and has an identical twin brother who is left-handed. Beyond just a naming device, DeFranco is extending the concept to his brewing. In addition to five flagship beers (an American red ale, a Belgian-style wheat, a blonde ale, a brown ale, and an India pale ale), Mirror Twin will feature special offerings presented in a way that’s cannily calibrated to entice beer nerds everywhere: twin beers brewed using recipes that are identical except for a single differentiating ingredient, and served side-by-side in 8-ounce pours.
“If you brew two identical beers, and you ferment them with diff erent types of yeast — you know, one kind of an American-style yeast and the other a Belgian-style yeasts — it will be unbelievable to you how diff erent those two beers will be,” DeFranco said. “Same thing with hops.”
DeFranco arrived in Lexington in 2013, fresh out of law school at Southern Illinois University. It was during his law studies that he became intrigued with home brewing through a friend.
“I just really liked it. It really fits my personality because I’m creative in some aspects and I’m very analytical, so it really is a perfect mix of those two things,” DeFranco said. “Because to be a really good brewer I think you need to know some science, there’s some biology to it, there’s some chemistry to it, but it’s also an art form. … I just went all in.”
While waiting to take the Kentucky bar exam, DeFranco began working midnight shifts for Alltech, where he did everything from filling kegs to brewing.
“The day I passed the bar, I left,” he said. “I just couldn’t do the night shift anymore.”
He had struck up friendships with the owners and brewers at Blue Stallion and by early December 2015 was working there. And while he now had his law license in hand, DeFranco had a choice to make.
“Once I passed the bar I had to make a decision: Am I going to go get a law job or do I stick with the brewery?” he recalled. “So I said, you know what, I really love doing this and this is my passion.”
He had been talking about his dream of opening a microbrewery with his friend Ryan Reed, a Dayton, Ohio, native and marketing professional who moved to Lexington after about a dozen years working on Wall Street in New York City.
“I was more looking to see how far he would take this idea,” Reed said. “But before you know it we’re meeting with the Small Business Administration, and they helped us with some guidance on putting a business plan together. And then we started looking for investors.”
Before long DeFranco recruited a college friend, Mike Sobolak, who lives in Chicago where he works for internet giant Google. Rounding out the Mirror Twin quartet is local businessman and investor David Long.
“I like this area because you have a great neighborhood behind us,” said Long. “And then when you’re coming from, like, the Hamburg area … if you’re coming from that part of town, we’re the first brewery you’ll pass.”
DeFranco and Reed said they became interested in the Warehouse Block neighborhood after visiting last year’s block party. Like many of the properties in the area, Mirror Twin’s new home is owned by Walker Properties, which has carefully cultivated the area. The neighborhood is known for the European-style restaurant National Provisions, Locals’ bar, Blue Door Smokehouse, as well as a growing number of fi tness centers, home decor shops and more.
Reed said the original plan for Mirror Twin didn’t include food.
“We were going to go the route of Country Boy and others and just sticking with the beer side, and a few months into it we fi nd out this location is not zoned for a microbrewery; it’s zoned for a brewpub. And the diff erence being the food aspect, so we have to have food,” Reed said. “We scrambled. … So the fi rst call I made, I actually reached out to them through Twitter, was Rolling Oven, and he got right back to me.”
“He” is Nick Ring, owner of Rolling Oven, which operates a popular food truck and has a brick-and-mortar spot in Nicholasville.
“We’re really excited about this partnership with Mirror Twin Brewing. They have great beer and a really interesting concept,” Ring said. “I think they’ll be really successful, and I know from experience with breweries over the years that my menu goes well with the brewery crowd. You can’t go wrong with pizza and beer.”