It was a random Saturday in mid-December 2023 when Jason and Nicole Thompson casually decided to embark on their lifelong dream. They had welcomed a small group of friends to their brand-new Midtown brewery the night before to celebrate obtaining their liquor license, the last legal formality on their checklist, and the private party had gone well. They had three beers on tap and zero employees, but they decided to tend bar themselves, quietly throw up a "we're open" post on their business' Facebook page and see what happened.
What happened was a steady stream of about 100 to 150 people flowing in and out throughout the day.
"We were like, 'It's working,'" says Nicole.
Jason adds: "We're terrified and excited."
Such was the auspicious soft opening of Blue Jay Brewing (2710 Locust Street, bluejaybrewing.com). But the nonchalance with which the Thompsons decided to welcome their first paying customers belies the years of work, dreaming and risk-taking it took to get here — not to mention the actual mileage. Before returning to his native St. Louis in 2011 to join the newly opened Urban Chestnut Brewing Company, Jason honed his craft in brewhouses from Los Angeles to the D.C. metro area to suburban Chicago. This cross-country career path was made possible by the fact that all three of those breweries were owned by Gordon Biersch, one of the handful of chain breweries that dominated the craft beer landscape in the 1990s and 2000s.
The memory of chain breweries is disappearing almost as rapidly as the business model itself, but it was an important part of the craft beer revolution. For decades starting in the late 1980s, upstart local alternatives to Big Beer, like Schlafly or Kansas City's Boulevard, were relatively few and far between in the U.S. Filling those gaps, and the frosty pint glasses of the beer-curious, were places such as Gordon Biersch, Rock Bottom and RAM. These nationwide chains essentially invented what we consider a brewpub, pairing full menus of American pub grub with beer that was generally meant to be consumed on site. But just because the tap list was meant to complement the meal and adhered to corporate guidelines (i.e. each pub had a red, a brown, a stout, a hefeweizen, etc.), most of it was made locally and thus tailored to the twists and tastes of the host cities. As such, these breweries were not only havens for nascent beer nerds, but they were also a breeding ground for an entire generation of brewers looking to learn and create something outside of their insular homebrew clubs.
This included Jason Thompson, who followed Nicole to Los Angeles in 2004 as she pursued a career in film and thought he might get into brewing. Gordon Biersch, one of the few breweries in Tinseltown at the time, took him on first as a driver delivering kegs between restaurants and then as a brewer while he also enrolled in the renowned brewing science program at the University of California - Davis. "When they hired me, the talent they already had working for them was awesome," Jason says. "I learned so much from their mentorship."
Once the Thompsons started a family, they wanted to get back to St. Louis, and the corporate structure of Gordon Biersch facilitated transfers to D.C. metro (not close, but technically closer) and Bolingbrook, Illinois (much closer). All the while, Thompson was learning to brew on different systems, focusing on European-style ales and lagers while the rest of the exploding craft-beer world was hopped up on IPAs. That passion for German-style beers dovetailed nicely with the vision of Urban Chestnut, which finally brought the Thompsons back to St. Louis.
But the couple always wanted to one day have a place of their own. Jason left Urban Chestnut in 2019, and the pandemic gave the Thompsons time to hone their business plan. The sighting of a few bright blue birds on pristine snowfall in their yard inspired the avian name (which also incorporates Jason's nickname 'Jay'). They picked out a 3,500-square-foot space in the JCMidtown development that came with a roomy, enclosed outdoor space, perfect for a biergarten.
Now open five days a week, Wednesday through Sunday, Blue Jay Brewing has eight beers on tap, including the first beer Jason brewed here, a Bavarian-style Hefeweizen called Okay! that is more than just all right, featuring smooth notes of vanilla and a hint of spice to offset the warm banana typical in the style. There are also numerous collaborations with area breweries, like a smoked porter brewed with Wellspent and the Midtown Shuffle Cold IPA cooked up with Urban Chestnut, both just down the street.
In fact, Blue Jay's Midtown location, so near Wellspent, UCBC's biergarten and the Schlafly Taproom, helps give St. Louis something it's never really had before and something Jason could only have imagined back in 2004: a cluster of craft breweries to attract beer tourists and bar-hoppers that can learn from each other.
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