USA, MO: Big Grove Brewery sets its sights on new facility in Kansas City area

Continuing an out-of-state expansion that began in Omaha, Big Grove Brewery has its sights set on the 2.2 million-population Kansas City metro area, Des Moines Register reported on September 8.

Iowa-based Big Grove said Monday, Sept. 8, that it plans to open a tap room and brewery in the affluent suburb of Prairie Village, Kansas, about 10 miles south of downtown Kansas City, Missouri. The company said the Shops at Prairie Village location will open in the first half of 2026 in a former Macy's department store that closed in 2020.

Big Grove got its start in 2013 when Doug Goettsch and Matt and Faye Swift founded the brewery in the Johnson County town of Solon, about 12 miles from Iowa City. It's now the second-largest brewery in Iowa after Decorah's internationally known Toppling Goliath. Big Grove brews like its popular Easy Eddy IPA are distributed across Iowa and a growing number of neighboring states.

But where Decorah-based Toppling Goliath has concentrated on building distribution, which reaches from Los Angeles to New York and Miami, and recently acknowledged it had pulled back from a Drake University-area project that would have included a Des Moines brewery and taproom, Big Grove has leaned heavily into the hospitality wing of its business.

It added an Iowa City brewery and taproom in 2017. A Des Moines taproom and restaurant followed in 2022 at 555 17th St. Next came a Cedar Rapids location, which opened in 2023.

Big Grove now is building a taproom and restaurant in Omaha near the University of Nebraska Medical Center that it says is scheduled to open later in September.

In a news release, Big Grove CEO Matt Swift said the company was "ecstatic" about building a location in the Kansas City metro, its largest city yet.

“We toured multiple locations in the area," Swift said. The Prairie Village site — the first since the original in Solon not to be in or adjacent to a sizable downtown area — "immediately made us feel like we were at home in a more neighborhood setting, part of the community," he said.

The choice to redevelop the former department store reflects an increasingly common answer to a question across the country: What to do with hundreds of department and big-box store buildings vacated amid the growth of online retailing?

In 2020 Mason City opened a 2,000-seat hockey arena in a long-empty downtown JCPenney store. The owners of Des Moines' Merle Hay Mall have a similar plan for a Younkers store vacant since 2018. Tax financing for the plan could come to a vote by the Iowa Economic Development Authority this month.

Building reuse is also common among breweries. Big Grove's Des Moines location is the former Crescent Chevrolet, and retains its lighted bow-tie sign. Singlespeed Brewing's Des Moines location used to be a tire store. Confluence Brewing is in a former industrial space. Exile Brewing's F.W. Fitch Building was a shampoo factory. And Firetrucker Brewery in Ankeny occupies the city's old firehouse.

Big Grove began distributing its beers in the Kansas City metro in the spring, according to the news release. Even before landing a tenant, officials in Prairie Village held a ceremonial "wall breaking" in January to commemorate plans to repurpose the old Macy's store, according to Kansas City's KSHB-TV.

"We’re looking forward to being a catalyst of that change," Swift said.