Three Taverns Brewery Will Open its Second Location on Morphing Memorial Drive

Decatur-based brewery Three Taverns is opening a second, more expansive location in the Atlanta Dairies on Memorial Drive in Reynoldstown. Three Taverns Imaginarium opens next year and will include an experimental lab and a brewery with a tasting room.

Owner Brian Purcell says he chose the site along this increasingly trafficked and transforming stretch of Memorial Drive due to its proximity to the Eastside BeltLine trail three blocks away and to take advantage of the open container license at the Atlanta Dairies complex.

The Imaginarium plans to have four or five “core” beers on tap and a rotating list of up to 25 experimental beers in the tasting room. Three Taverns is also going to play with lactose to create milk stouts, fruit and cream sours, and milkshake IPAs at the Memorial Drive facility. Food will be available via “rotating kiosks or pop-up stations.”

“The earliest craft [beer] pioneers were left to construct their own brewing systems from used dairy equipment, which are still in use in some breweries today,” adds Purcell. “Even earlier during the dark years of prohibition, some of the few breweries that survived turned to the dairy industry and used their skills in keeping things cold to make dairy products.”

Three Taverns makes Belgian-style beers, sours, IPAs, and stouts. The brewery joins Thrive Farmers coffee cafe, a yet-named barbecue restaurant and a diner, and a concert hall with a rooftop bar from the owners of Variety Playhouse.

The old Atlanta Dairies is the latest mixed-reuse complex part of a multi-million dollar metamorphosis currently transforming Memorial Drive from Boulevard in Cabbagetown to Stoval Street in Reynoldstown into a somewhat sterilized interpretation of the area’s blue collar, industrial past.

The live-work-play project is under the direction of Paces Properties — the developer behind Krog Street Market before it was sold, low-density retail and restaurant center Larkin on Memorial a half-mile away, and Stove Works on the Beltline at Krog Street. This neat and tidy, in-town lifestyle package that is the Dairies also includes several hundred apartments, in addition to the concert venue, retail shops, and an acre green space called the Yard.

Jonathan Phillips/Curbed Atlanta

• All Three Taverns Brewery coverage [EATL]
• 13 photos: Memorial Drive’s impressive metamorphosis today [CurbedATL]
• Krog Street Market has officially sold to Charlotte-based investors [CurbedATL]

777 Memorial Drive SE, Atlanta. atlantadairies.com.