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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.
Geoff Dale is starting to hear something he never expected: customers walking into Three Heads Brewing to tell him The Kind IPA was the beer they used to sneak out of their dad’s fridge.
“It’s such a weird moment when you have these conversations,” Dale says. “That was Genesee for all of us. It’s pretty cool.”
Pretty cool is one way to put it. The other way is to say that Three Heads Brewing has done something that almost nobody in the post-2010 Rochester craft beer wave set out to do and almost none of them have managed: it became a generational brewery. The beer your dad drank at the show. The logo you recognize before you read it. The place that was just always there on Atlantic Avenue, in the Neighborhood of the Arts, doing the thing.
This June, Three Heads turns 10 at 186 Atlantic Ave. A decade in the current craft beer climate is not nothing. It is, in fact, a lot.
The story of how Three Heads got to Atlantic Avenue is one of the better bootstrap narratives in Rochester brewing history. Dale, Todd Dirrigl, and Dan Nothnagle—three Brighton guys who lived close enough to each other that they called their little corner “the triangle”—learned to homebrew together, won some medals, and eventually decided the logical next step was to turn the hobby into something larger. (One of my favorite bits of 3HB lore: Dirrigl and Dale are married to twin sisters.)
It all started with Nothnagle’s near-obsession with West Coast India pale ales (and the trademark clean bitterness), which is fitting, because that fixation eventually became The Kind IPA, still the brewery’s best-selling beer 15 years later and still among the top-selling craft beers in Monroe County.
Founded in 2011, the brewery spent its first five-plus years contract brewing at Custom Brewcrafters in Honeoye Falls. They built the brand first. The Kind and Too Kind Double IPA became fixtures on Rochester draft lines. Brian Johnson—“the fourth head”—helped push the product into accounts.
In December 2013, Lake Beverage picked up distribution, and things started moving fast. By 2015, 70% of sales were happening in the Rochester area alone. They had, somewhat by accident, become a regional brewery with deeply local roots.
So, when they decided to build, the Neighborhood of the Arts was the right fit.
On June 19, 2016, Three Heads opened its 19,500-square-foot facility—a $4 million, purpose-built brewery with a 30-barrel system, five 90-barrel fermenters, a stage for live music, and enough optimism to fill all of it twice over. The lot at the corner of Atlantic and Anderson had been vacant for decades, and was, as neighborhood leaders told me in 2016, a “redevelopment priority.”
“We took an ugly parking lot, that was empty and wasn’t super well maintained, we’ve put a business here that’s going to help strengthen the neighborhood,” Dale said at the time. The block proved him right. Neighboring businesses and developments followed. (Just stand outside the brewery and look around; you’ll see new businesses and housing that has sprouted up in the past 10 years.)
The summer of 2016, when Three Heads opened with three nights of live music and a collaboration Scotch ale with Rohrbach Brewing, felt like the crest of something. The craft beer boom was still very much a boom. Breweries were opening everywhere. Grocery stores were clearing shelf space. Consumers were enthusiastic, curious, and seemingly bottomless in their appetite for anything with a cool label and a hazy pour.
Then the industry grew up all at once.
“The problem is now that craft beer isn’t just David vs. Goliath like it was 10 years ago,” Nothnagle says. “Craft brewery against giant macro. Now it’s macro-craft—craft breweries bought and owned by huge international breweries.”
Three Heads is not one of those. But the squeeze has been real regardless. The Brewers Association’s full-year 2025 production report confirmed what anyone in the industry already felt: total craft production fell 5.1%, closures outpaced openings for the second straight year, and 60% of breweries reported volume declines. The gradient by business model tells the structural story clearly—brewpubs fell 1.7%, taprooms dropped 3.9%, regional breweries slid 5.9%, and microbreweries, the engine of the boom, lost 8.9%. The closer you are to your customer, the better you held up. Distribution-dependent models took the hardest hits.
“The nickels and dimes add up to dollars,” Dale says. “It’s really what it comes down to. We’ve always been a business focused on volume—we’d try to be cheaper but go for volume. When all your supplies start inching up, it makes it a lot harder to exist with that kind of business model. We’ve had to re-evaluate and tweak.”
Three Heads survived because it adapted. But it also survived because it was, at its core, the kind of place that holds up in a correction: a room where people want to be, with a stage and a patio and a neighborhood that came to think of it as part of the fabric.
“We’ve also seen the evolution of the industry in the past decade,” Nothnagle says. “We could get away with stuff in our naivety, because there was more enthusiasm in the industry then. You’re better positioned to handle that with more experience.”
Part of that experience is the team. Head brewer Casey Kindlon has been there since the Atlantic Avenue brewery opened a decade ago. So has taproom manager Dave Coniglio—long-time fan, friend, and co-founder of Rochester’s biggest beer Facebook group before he was ever an employee. Several bartenders, too. In an industry known for burnout and churn, that kind of institutional memory is its own competitive advantage.
“I love our squad here,” Dale says. “We have a really good team that is able to fight and be lean and mean. We have a bunch of creative minds and a bunch of hard workers.”
He pauses, then grins—and here is where the guy who nicknamed himself the “Minister of Mayhem” lets you know exactly who you’re dealing with.
“But it’s like everything else, every step of the way, there are challenges. You have to adapt. That’s part of owning your own business,” he says. “If it’s not this, it’s going to be something else that’s a challenge. COVID showed that you needed to adapt and think on your feet and just accept new realities.
“If you sit there and complain about it, it does no good,” he adds. “The key is to put your head down and think about how we’re going to make it work. Pardon me if I get all metaphysical or whatever or hippie. That’s what I am.”
If The Kind IPA represents where Three Heads came from, the brewery’s anniversary release—585 Hazy IPA—represents where the market went, and where Three Heads is planting its flag for the next decade.
The label alone is worth the price of admission. Designed once again by Allen Firlit, a local high school art teacher and Three Heads’ artist for the past 15 years, the can is a Rochester love letter packed with landmarks, inside jokes, and Easter eggs. Firlit’s artwork has always been at the heart of 3HB’s identity. At the center of the 585 is a couple posed deliberately in the style of American Gothic. Around them: all four seasons, neighborhood references, visual details that reward anyone who has lived here long enough to know what to look for.
“The least we could do was celebrate what I think is the greatest city in the world,” Dale says. “We are celebrating everything that makes us great.”
Inside the can is equally considered. Three Heads has made plenty of hazy seasonals over the years but never committed one permanently to the core lineup—despite persistent requests from Lake Beverage.
“Our distributor has asked for a year-round hazy for a long time and we’ve always put it in the one-off category,” Nothnagle says. They spent months on it, running multiple pilot batches, looping in the distributor. “We got a lot of involvement from the folks at Lake Beverage. We really think we’re gonna have a beer that everyone is going to like.”
That reluctance-turned-commitment is the actual story. Retailers like Wegmans have been pushing breweries toward reliable, year-round offerings that hold permanent shelf space, and Three Heads has the distribution infrastructure and the brand recognition to make a play for that slot. The brewery hopes 585 stands alongside The Kind as a second tentpole—a year-round hazy that both the taproom and the grocery aisle can depend on. In a market where hazy IPA is one of the few categories still showing consistent off-premise strength, the timing is right.
“It has been a crazy ride,” Dale says, pivoting to the decade behind the team. “When we opened up, we didn’t know how to do a lot of this stuff and we learned it on the fly. How much money to have in the safe, best practices, whatever. That first year, every step along the way, it was like having a newborn—‘OK, I know what this cry means or what this means.’ Opening this place, it was like having triplets. We had three newborns that we were trying to figure out at the same time. We had the back of house, we had brewing the beer, we had running a tasting room. That first year was a blur.”
Ten years later, the brewery is still standing, and the beer is in your dad’s fridge.
Along with breweries like Naked Dove and the original Roc Brewing, Three Heads helped form the vanguard of Rochester’s post-2010 brewery wave—the generation that helped transform local beer from niche hobby culture into something woven into the fabric of the city. New York law changes in 2012 with the farm brewery license and 2014 with the craft act (allowing breweries to sell their beers by the pint in their own taprooms) provided tailwinds. The neighborhoods, the live music scenes, the social-media hustle provided the rest.
“It’s weird to think about how long we’ve been doing this,” Dale says. “It’s such a part of the fabric of who we are and everything we’ve put into this. It’s nice to have these moments to celebrate.”
To celebrate, the brewery is bringing back several archival favorites alongside 585, including the Loopy Oatmeal Red Ale and the Blimey English Pale Ale. Nothnagle noted with a laugh that Blimey probably hasn’t been brewed on the Atlantic Avenue system and almost certainly hasn’t been released since the contract-brewing days at CB’s. Expect some cellar surprises and possibly some anniversary pricing, too.
The three-day party runs June 11-13 at the brewery on Atlantic Avenue. Thursday launches 585 Hazy IPA with a concert from local outlaw-country favorites Public Water Supply. Friday features the Honey Smugglers—both the name of a Three Heads seasonal lager and the band of longtime bartender Brian MacDonald. Saturday closes with A Girl Named Genny, which is also celebrating its own 10th anniversary.
“We have reasonably priced beers at the store, at Wegmans, at Tops, all the different retailers,” Nothnagle says. “People can enjoy it at home for under two bucks a bottle.”
He pauses, working through the math the way only someone who has been in this business for 15 years thinks about it.
“When you sell a keg, you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s potentially 120 people that are gonna be enjoying a pint of our beer.’ When you really stop and think about how many people have enjoyed some of our products, that’s what hits me. How many people have come through our doors and shared a pint with us? Those people that have just experienced what we have to offer, an event that we’ve done, or a charity we’ve helped—it’s pretty wild.”
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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