This is Warped Wing’s fourth year taking home the top honor for Best Local Brewery. Since debuting in downtown Dayton in 2014, Warped Wing has steadily climbed the ranks of our Best of Dayton contest.
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
“We’re honored to even be considered the Best of Dayton because it’s important to us,” said Nick Bowman, co-founder and vice president of sales and marketing. “Our mission is to provide the brewery experience in Ohio and maybe someday beyond.”
Best of Dayton 2021 winners:
» Arts, Entertainment and Music
» Bars, Breweries and Nightlife
» Food, Restaurants and Dining
» People and Places
» Shopping, Gifts and Services
In August, Warped Wing announced plans to open a new 13,000-sqare-foot facility, Warped Wing Mason, at 5650 Tylersville Road. Despite working through a few equipment delays, the brewery is still hopeful it can open before the end of the year, sometime in December.
Mason will be Warped Wing’s third location. In Aug. 2020, the team opened a 20,000-square-foot facility, The Warped Wing Barrel Room & Smokery, in Springboro. The facility features a tap room, a restaurant, an outdoor biergarten-style patio, a large space for barrel-aging beers, a test-pilot brewery, a distribution hub and event space.
Though things have not always gone as expected, the Warped Wing team is proud of the way they’ve navigated the journey.
“The Springboro location and now the soon-to-be Mason location, those are opportunities that came our way,” Bowman said. “And as a team, we evaluated them and we acted on them. We were prepared. And so you know, those are things that weren’t in the plan, but they’ve helped change and evolve our business.”
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Credit: CONTRIBUTED
When debuting in downtown Dayton in 2014, Warped Wing was just ahead of the brewery boom in the region. It saw an opportunity to be a leader in the field and opened with a full production and canning facility from the start.
At the very beginning of Warped Wing’s story, when planning where to open their brewery, the founding team of Bowman, Joe Waizmann and John Haggerty were presented with viable options that were on the outskirts of the city and into the suburbs of Dayton.
“I think we held it up and it was John, our brewmaster, who said, ‘I think we owe it to ourselves and to the project to be downtown and be a part of that rejuvenation and that re-urbanization of downtown,’” Bowman said.
As Warped Wing’s reputation grows and expands outside of the city limits, Bowman said they will always have a commitment to downtown as they continue to craft their own, ever-evolving path.
“We’ve built our identity around Dayton and feel that downtown is resembles us,” Bowman said. “We feel like at some level we would always have a presence downtown.”
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
Warped Wing Brewing Company
First Place: Best Craft Beer Bar
First Place: Best Local Brewery
26 Wyandot St., Dayton
25 Wright Station Way, Springboro
937-222-7003
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