How Preservation Beer and Lock 32 Brewing silenced the critics

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.

Casey Dunlavey and Seth Clark spent nearly a decade not brewing their own beer. This was not an oversight.

From the moment they opened Lock 32 Brewing Co. in Pittsford in 2014, they were doing something more deliberate than most people recognized: testing a market before betting the house on it. A reasonable thing to do, it turns out, when you’re trying to build something that lasts.

The full-production brewery they always wanted—Preservation Beer Co., now humming in Fairport—is proof that the strategy worked, even if it took a while, a surprise taproom closure, and a buildout that chewed through more money and time than anyone planned before anyone would admit it.

Lock 32 opened at 10 Schoen Place along the Erie Canal with a straightforward vision: create the kind of repeatable, welcoming experience you’d find in a well-run English or Irish pub. Somewhere you’d want to come back to, week after week, with your family, your work crew, your two beer-nerd friends and the one person who just wants a cocktail.

To do that, they relied on contract brewing partners—Custom Brewcrafters, Rohrbach, Roc Brewing—to produce their beer while they focused on building the taproom experience and figuring out who their customers actually were. (It’s worth noting that Lock 32 outlasted two of its three contract partners.)

“Why make a massive investment on something we’re not sure of,” Dunlavey says. “Why not test the market? Learn what our customer base is. We did that.” Clark puts it more plainly: “You’re throwing darts at a dart board. You don’t know anything about what’s working.”

The plan was always to build a production brewery. From day one, that future had a name before it had a building: Preservation Beer Co. It sits at 75 N. Main St. in Fairport, inside the Cannery complex—the former site of the American Can Co., where beer preservation was improved and perfected in the early 1900s. Designer Gavin Thomas, paying close attention to the history of the place, made the brewery’s logo represent the seam of a can. The details matter here, which tells you something about the people running it. Dunlavey, Clark, and head brewer Phill MacArthur all live in Fairport, within two miles of the brewery. MacArthur looks like someone you’d see coaching a youth soccer team on a Saturday morning, which is not far from reality: He’s a Fairport dad, has the kids, has the bike he uses to pick them up from school, and has lived there continuously for six years now, the longest stretch he’s ever stayed put in one place. (There’s a schmaltzy pun here about planting yourself somewhere, allowing the roots to grow deep and strong.)

During the contract-brewing years, MacArthur was in Seattle, developing recipes for Dunlavey and Clark from the other side of the country, overnighting beer samples for them to try. The communication worked, but there’s a difference between texting your brewer and being able to walk into the same room with him.

“It simplifies things quite a bit,” MacArthur says, with the measured understatement of someone who spent years doing it the other way. He was a brewer at Custom Brewcrafters when the Lock 32 relationship began.

They began discussions with Fairport economic development officials nearly four years before the brewery opened, vetted multiple properties, had a few near-misses that “didn’t quite work out,” as Dunlavey puts it—which, as with most things in this story, happened for a reason. In the meantime, they opened a second taproom, Seven Story Brewing in Bushnell’s Basin, and kept growing. The contract model was funding the expansion. The plan was coming together, slowly, deliberately.

Then the wheels wobbled. Seven Story closed in June 2023 due to a landlord dispute—frustrating in the moment, though the timing contained a quiet irony.

“Before Seven Story closed, this was already in the works,” Clark says. “This was all part of the plan. However, we thought we’d be feeding two other taprooms in addition to this.”

He pauses. “Thank goodness, because we wouldn’t have been able to do it.” The 10-barrel brewhouse at Preservation barely keeps pace with demand across two locations as it stands. “Could you imagine, Phill, having a third place to supply?” Dunlavey asked during our conversation. MacArthur’s response: “It would’ve been tight.” That’s brewer-speak for absolutely not.

Preservation opened in November 2023, but they weren’t brewing their own beer yet. They’d completed large sections of the renovation without power or water, and construction reality, as ever, had its way with the timeline. The move was purposeful: get the front of the house open, generate revenue, bring production online when it was actually ready. “We made the calculated decision, let’s not rush it on the back-of-the-house end,” Dunlavey says. “It’s not unlike our whole origin story—from contract brewing to producing everything in-house. Let’s not go too crazy.” They started brewing on-site about eight months after opening.

It was around this time that the vocal contingent of craft beer purists (particularly in overzealous local Facebook groups) who had spent years showing up online to criticize the contract arrangement, and the quality of the beer, went conspicuously quiet. MacArthur medaled at the most recent New York State Craft Beer Competition for his Groundskeeper Philly Scotch Ale—bonus points for the Simpsons reference, which is exactly the kind of nerdy-but-approachable energy this place runs on. Consider what that means in this market: the Scotch ale, alongside the cream ale, is effectively the official craft beer style of Monroe County, a legacy cemented over decades by Rohrbach. To come into that tradition as a new production brewery and medal in that style is quite a statement. Critics tend to go quiet when the beer speaks for itself.

The tap list at Preservation reflects both technical range and a clear-eyed understanding of what people actually want: lagers, IPAs, stouts, a hard seltzer that’s become one of the best sellers at both locations, and a pre-mixed cocktail on draft—currently a Blue Gatorade-style sports drink with vodka—that is, at times, their top-selling item. I tried the cocktail. My journalistic duty demanded it. It passed muster, easily.

“We’ve had to check our egos,” Dunlavey says. “Our goal from Lock, in the early days, was to create a repeatable experience for people. But we’re not driven by the fact that our entire identity is 100% beer. We have a friendly staff. We have an approachable menu, where if you’re coming with two beer nerds and you’re not a beer nerd, you won’t be intimidated when you walk in.”

MacArthur frames the business logic plainly: “We made that seltzer and it did so well that we took the cider off. The cider is the most expensive keg on the wall. Do enough of those small adjustments and they add up.” You don’t fully appreciate what they’ve built until you actually show up. On a Bills game day, the place is packed wall to wall, standing room in every direction, the kind of crowd that makes you understand why a 10-barrel brewhouse runs at capacity.

On a Friday night when Claudia Hoyser is playing—she’s become a regional country draw with real pull—the Cannery complex overflows, the outdoor areas filling up as people spill between Preservation, the neighboring Faircraft Brauhaus, and Iron Smoke Distillery down the way. Walkable village, dinner, drinks, live music, people everywhere. It’s one of the more genuinely vibrant entertainment districts in Monroe County, and Preservation is at the center of it.

Nobody in this business is pretending things are easy right now. The recent closure of Naked Dove in Canandaigua landed hard on Dunlavey. Naked Dove was a foundational place—opened in 2011 as Ontario County’s first craft brewery, built on stubborn consistency rather than hype, home to the finest porter ever produced in this region. It helped transform Canandaigua into a craft beer destination and set a standard that other breweries quietly measured themselves against for 15 years. When places like that close, it means something.

“The days of just opening the doors and people flooding in are gone,” Dunlavey says. “We host a lot of private parties. Birthdays, anniversaries, corporate events. We have live music on weekends. You have to give people a reason to go out.

“It’s so difficult when you have places like Naked Dove closing,” he continues. “That place was such a cornerstone. So, it’s really hard not to have that draw all of your attention. You come down here on a weekend, there are people everywhere. It’s just hard not to focus on the negative.”

The tension he’s describing is real: an industry where the foundational places—built on community and consistency—face structural headwinds that have nothing to do with the quality of their beer. Preservation is doing the things you have to do to survive.

The control piece, after years of trusting contract partners, means everything to them now.

“Phill and Nick made it,” Dunlavey says, referring to brewer Nick Mesrobian, the former Roc Brewing head brewer who joined the team and handles production alongside MacArthur. “Everything is dialed in. We know how it’s pouring. We’re in full control of everything.” Dunlavey closes it better than I could: “Without Lock, none of this would’ve happened. (And) Lock continuing to produce during this buildout, it helped so much. It’s been kinda cool to have Lock get knocked in the beginning for contract brewing and now seeing Phill and Nick brewing such great quality beer. And we’re now delivering that to Lock, while Lock continues to grow. It’s been a slow burn, but it has been fun to see.”

Preservation Beer Co. is at 75 N. Main St. inside the Cannery complex in Fairport. Lock 32 Brew Co. is at 10 Schoen Place in Pittsford, along the Erie Canal.

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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