Big changes for Brothers Drake

After months of rumors, the popular Brothers Drake Meadery in the Short North announced this morning that it will be closing its music stage for renovations after one last show on August 6th.

“We wanted to focus on a different genre of performance, because we’ve been really loud and diverse on the music stage, and we’ve done every kind of event at Brothers Drake,” owner Sarah Benary told me in an interview. “We wanted to raise our business to the next level regarding our mead production.”

Benary said Brothers Drake is currently producing 12,000 gallons of mead per year–about the maximum capacity for the 3,000 square-foot size of the current facility.

“A lot of magic happens behind the sliding door that’s easy to overlook,” Benary said. “We want to focus more on events and change the stage and music entertainment focus to a little more jazz, a little more chill. We still want to have a reputation for high quality music, but there’s so many new venues that we wanted to redefine the space and focus in a different way.”

In the beginning, Brothers Drake grew two businesses side-by-side: music and mead. Benary told me it was first it was out of necessity, and then the music took off unexpectedly and organically, in part thanks to recently departed booking agent April Kulcsar.

After years of success on both ends, the decision was made to pare down the breadth of their operation.

“We’ve invested a ton in this and it’s really hard to pick a date and say, now we’re going to change, but we really had to do that because we want to keep on making really high quality mead but not lose the environment of this space,” Benary said.

The bar’s notable Jazz Wednesday will stick around, but Benary said the weekly Friday and Saturday night performances will be replaced by quarterly “festival performances.”

However, Brothers Drake is sending off its stage with a bang on August 6th, which happens to be National Mead Day. Local band Mojoflo will be performing, and it will feature special mead releases, including chipotle cherry, peanut butter and jelly and hopped stone fruit, all brewed with Ohio honey.

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