The next step for Runaway Blue

This post is one in a partnership between the Rochester Beacon and veteran reporter Will Cleveland, featuring articles published on his Substack site, Cleveland Prost.

Newark’s beloved nanobrewery has always been about more than beer. Now it’s proving it with a storage closet converted into a kitchen and a chicken sandwich worth driving for.

When Brian and Maria Bremer opened Runaway Blue Brewing in the fall of 2022, the vision was clear and, by their own admission, deliberately modest: bring craft beer culture to their hometown of Newark in Wayne County and give the community a place to gather. They accomplished that — and then some. Now, a few years into life at 102 S. Main St., the Bremers are ready to take the next step. It involves a kitchen and a commitment to chicken that borders on philosophical.

“You can’t just be a brewery and only make beer nowadays,” Maria says. “People expect all of it. So it’s just the next thing for us.”

The new program, which the Bremers are calling The Runaway Kitchen, launched earlier this month. Maria even designed the logo herself — a chicken sandwich in mid-sprint, legs and all, with the tagline food worth chasing. It is, in a single image, everything you need to know about the Bremers’ sensibility.

From snacks to serious

The evolution didn’t happen overnight. When Runaway Blue first opened, the menu started exactly where you’d expect a nanobrewery to start: potato chips, beef jerky, and weekend pretzels supplied by a local bakery. Then came a coffee line, developed in partnership with a local roastery — a vanilla bean coffee and a signature roast — which will now be followed by spirits-based cocktails as the taproom’s offerings quietly, steadily widened.

“When we first opened, that was the thing — we could just make beer,” Brian says. “(Three-and-half) years ago was a lot different.”

“So much has changed in the industry,” Maria adds.

It has, and the Bremers have watched it closely. What was once a viable model — open a taproom, make good beer, let the beer speak for itself — has become increasingly difficult to sustain on its own. The breweries that are thriving are the ones that have become destinations in the fullest sense: places where you can eat well, stay awhile, and find a reason to come back that has nothing to do with whatever’s on tap. Brian and Maria understood that, and the kitchen is their answer to it.

“It’s definitely a hard time for breweries right now and we’re not immune to that,” Brian says. “But we have a different market — we’re not worried about distro to Wegmans or bars. We’re still affected by all that stuff, but it’s a different feel. Everybody’s got their own issues.”

Their market, as Brian describes it, runs on two distinct rhythms. In winter, Runaway Blue is a hyper-local operation — the regulars, the mug club members, the neighbors who have made it part of their weekly routine. Come summer, the calculus shifts. Visitors drive in from Rochester and Syracuse, drawn by the reputation the brewery has quietly built.

“We’ve found people are driving more in the summer to come see us,” Brian says. “Our regulars, the locals — we don’t see them a lot in the summertime, because they’re all gone traveling in the opposite direction.”

A menu that gives people a reason to linger fits neatly into both seasons.

Why chicken?

In the crowded and sometimes chaotic world of brewery food offerings, it is easy to default to the expected: soft pretzels, charcuterie, maybe a pizza. The Bremers looked at that landscape and went a different direction.

It is a smart play. The chicken sandwich has become a defining food obsession of the past several years — a category capable of generating genuine excitement and the kind of loyal repeat customers who will drive 20 minutes out of their way for the right bird. The people who debate the crunch of a crust, the pull of the meat, and the heat of a sauce tend to be the same people who debate hop varieties and fermentation temperatures. In other words: Runaway Blue’s existing crowd, almost exactly.

The menu is built around a rotating cast of sandwiches, each designed to pair with something on draft, with options for heat-seekers and the more cautious alike. It will not be a large menu — the kitchen is, in Brian’s telling, a converted storage closet, something smaller than the interior of a food truck — but that’s entirely by design.

“Chicken is a good thing because you can really dress it up and make it your own,” Brian says. “Spicy, sweet — all sorts of ways to make it different. With a small menu, we thought that was a good way to offer variety and a lot of specials.”

It is the same instinct that shaped the brewery itself. Brian, who cut his teeth as the small-batch brewer at Young Lion in Canandaigua, built Runaway Blue around a 1-barrel system specifically so he could brew more batches, keep variety high, and take creative risks that larger operations can’t afford — the pancake breakfast stout, the blood orange quick sour, the Vanilla Bean Blonde Ale that customers refused to let rotate off the tap list until Brian eventually made it permanent. The kitchen will run on the same logic: stay focused, stay curious, and listen to what people love.

A space that already hums

Anyone who has spent a Saturday afternoon at Runaway Blue knows the place doesn’t need much help in the atmosphere department. Dogs sprawl across the floor. Mug club members nurse flights of whatever Brian has been tinkering with that week. The TVs are tuned to the Bills — always the Bills—the Bremers having long worn their allegiance on their sleeve, including a Bills-themed light lager called The Process. The taproom has the particular quality of a room where you sit down for one beer and find yourself still there two hours later.

The kitchen is designed to deepen that experience, not disrupt it. Food gives people a reason to arrive earlier, stay longer, and make Runaway Blue a full afternoon rather than a quick stop. For a brewery that has always staked its identity on being a genuine neighborhood fixture — not a novelty or a destination in the manufactured sense, but a real and necessary part of Newark life — that matters more than any menu item.

It is worth remembering what the Bremers were up against when they opened. Wayne County was, by Brian’s own description, “the last place to hit the craft beer boom.” Runaway Blue — named for Coley, their spirited Blue Heeler mix — helped change that story. The brewery became the second craft operation in the county, earned a reputation that stretched well beyond Newark, and produced beers like the hazy Bluest Sky that stack up favorably with some of the best in the Finger Lakes region.

A kitchen — and a chicken sandwich worth the drive — looks like the next chapter of that same story. The Bremers didn’t expect to need one when they opened. But they’ve always been good at reading the room.

“When we bought the space, we never expected we would add a kitchen,” Brian says. “We told ourselves, ‘We’re gonna be a brewery.’”

They still are, just with a few tweaks, pivots, and improvements.

Will Cleveland is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. A former Democrat and Chronicle reporter, he writes about beer in the Finger Lakes region and Western New York on Substack.

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