After 15 years of living in Pelham and growing up in the Valleydale Road and Caldwell Mill area of Shelby County, Peter Genereux knows Pelham the area well. And now he’s brought it something it hasn’t had until this point—a brewing company that operates as brewpub (so it serves food!). Two other customer-friendly offerings we should mention: they offer table service, and their menu is on an app called Untappd you can view anywhere. We talked with Peter in March as they were serving up beer and wine and food at Oak Mountain Brewing Company and preparing to start brewing their own beer. Here’s what he shared.
How did Oak Mountain Brewing come to be?
I worked for Alabama Crown for 12 years and saw all the breweries opening up in downtown Birmingham and Pelham and Shelby County being underserved. I thought especially with Birmingham Bulls playing in Pelham, Live Nation bringing concerts to Oak Mountain Amphitheatre and Oak Mountain State Park expanding, people come to the area year-round. We found a building at the corner of 31 and 119, and we were supposed to open last year but with COVID we slowed down. In January we opened as a tap room selling other people’s beer and wine, and by the middle of April we hope to start brewing our own beer and by May we hope to be serving it.
What’s on tap now?
Right now we have 24 craft beers we are rotating out, and we supplement that with another 14 cans or bottles. We have Alabama locals like Ferris and Good People and Trim Tab and Straight to Ale and Common Bond, and regional breweries like High Wire and Sierra Nevada and Southern Probation—plus other mainstays and European beers. For wine we will do four whites and three reds by the glass and a few more bottle-only options.
What about the food selection?
We have some appetizers like hummus, spinach artichoke dip, nachos and pretzels and will be doing some paninis, and we also run food trucks Thursday to Sunday like Hey Baby and Hot Dog Nation and others.
Tell us about the beer you’ll brew there soon.
We will have four core beers—a pilsner, a blonde, an IPA and a kettle sour—on draft in our tap room and through our distributor, and we will have eight more beers of ours on tap rotating. Clay Baldwin who was head brewer at Ghost Train is our head brewer, so that gives us some credibility. We want quality beer and consistent beer. Our pilsner is our Pelham Pilsner. We are working on our names for our other beers, but they might be named after things in Oak Mountain State Park.
What does the building you are in have to offer?
The building was originally Alabama Outdoors, and then it was a mattress store. One of the things I like about the space is the 20-foot ceiling heights, so we were able to get taller tanks and coolers. There was also a mezzanine that gives us another 1,000 square feet upstairs that people can rent out for birthday parties or other events. We extended our patio so it wraps around the side of the building and put in a garage door. We built a stage and are doing live music Friday and Saturday and trivia on Thursdays.
