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This story is a joint publication partnership between the Rochester Beacon and the Cleveland Prost.
For more than 140 years, the big brick building at 1755 Pioneer Road in Shortsville was built around the idea of making things.
It began in 1879 as the Shortsville Wheel Works, producing wooden artillery and carriage wheels and eventually supplying wheels for early automobiles. Later, the Pioneer Thresher Co. moved in and manufactured equipment used to thresh grain, beans and peas. The faded Pioneer Thresher lettering is still visible on the side of the building, a reminder that this wasn’t originally designed for people to sit around drinking beer and playing cornhole.
On Sept. 15, it will start doing something considerably different.
Wheel Works Brewing Co. is preparing to open inside roughly 10,000 square feet of the enormous old factory, pairing a brewery and full-service restaurant with a sprawling outdoor property along the Canandaigua Lake Outlet. There will be a large patio, lawn games, fire areas, a three-season room, two bars, and plans for an event tent. There are also plans to eventually turn another 4,000-square-foot room into a recreation space with golf simulators, darts and short-lane bowling.
It is an unusually ambitious project for a brewery. Wheel Works is giving a massive, complicated old industrial property a new purpose while trying to create a destination in a part of Ontario County that doesn’t have a brewery on every corner.
“Our accountant always told our family that the only business worse than trucking is restaurants,” co-owner Ken Johnson says. “So, hey, I’m gonna prove him wrong, hopefully.”
Johnson may be uniquely qualified to take on the challenge. He owns Leonard’s Trucking in Farmington, a logistics company that has been around for more than 40 years, and he has spent much of his career figuring out how to move things from one place to another. He and business partner Jeff Roberge, the longtime owner of Sweet Times Bakery in Victor, have also been homebrewing together for more than seven years. (Sweet Times, which Roberge and his wife, Kim, have run for more than 30 years, just announced its closing.)
Roberge and Johnson had talked about opening a brewery for years. Then the Shortsville opportunity came along.
The property was purchased about six years ago by Bob Johnston, owner of Canandaigua-based B&B Builders. By the time Johnston acquired it, the building had been vacant and deteriorating for years. He repaired enough of it to use as storage for construction vehicles and equipment before eventually suggesting to Johnson, a longtime friend, that he consider turning the property into a brewery and restaurant.
Johnson was in Fort Myers having lunch with his wife when Johnston called to say somebody was interested in the property.
During that same lunch, Johnson got word that Wood Kettle Brewing’s brewing equipment was suddenly available for considerably less money than what it was originally listed for.
“I made the decision to take the dive into this new business on the exact same day I saw the price come down on the listed Wood Kettle brewing equipment,” Johnson says.
I tell Johnson that sounds like the universe aligning. Maybe. Or maybe it’s just what happens when somebody has been half-planning a brewery for years and finally gets a reason to stop half-planning it.
Once Johnson started buying equipment, he didn’t really stop. When Iron Hill Brewing, the Delaware-based chain of brewpubs, shut down its breweries and declared bankruptcy last year, Johnson followed the auction listings closely and eventually bought much of what was available from the chain’s Atlanta location.
“I pretty much bought everything except the electronics out of there,” he says.
That meant three truckloads of equipment, including furniture, booths, tables and most of the kitchen equipment, along with eight serving tanks. Wheel Works needs only two of them, so Johnson has already sold some of the extras and has more sitting in storage.
His trucking business came in handy when it came time to get all that equipment from Atlanta to Shortsville. The biggest expense, Johnson says, wasn’t the equipment itself but the contractors who had to dismantle, rig and pack everything for the trip north.
Other pieces came from breweries closer to home. The brewing system includes equipment from Wood Kettle in Greece, RG in Sweden, Triphammer Brewing in Fairport and Relative Risk Brewing on Seneca Lake. Ultimate Brew Service supplied some of the new brewing equipment and helped with the installation, while brewery consultant Jason Barnett helped get the system up and running.
Much of Wheel Works has been assembled from equipment and materials that already had another life.
Johnson and Roberge have reused pieces wherever they could, including granite from Wood Kettle for one of the bars, copper work done by Johnson’s son-in-law, and wood salvaged from other construction projects. Much of the furniture came from the Iron Hill auction. Refurbished fire-resistant doors separate the brewing space from the restaurant and seating area, and the old brick walls remain part of the room rather than being hidden behind a bunch of new construction.
Johnson jokes that he never expected to become an interior designer, but he has spent plenty of time making decisions about what the space should look like.
That’s one of the things I find most appealing about Wheel Works. The building isn’t merely a backdrop for the brewery’s logo. The owners are trying to preserve and incorporate the property’s history while figuring out how to make an old manufacturing facility work for an entirely different kind of business.
And there’s a lot of history to work with. Johnson says the building was once roughly 300,000 square feet before a fire partially destroyed it in the early 1900s. You can still find pieces of the old foundation around the property. The old factory’s relationship to the railroad and the outlet are still evident in the way the property sits in Shortsville.
For decades, the place existed to manufacture things. Now it will exist, at least in part, to give people somewhere to go.
Wheel Works also isn’t in a location where the owners can simply assume people will wander through the front door. It isn’t next to the Thruway or on one of the Finger Lakes’ major tourism corridors. It is about five minutes from Reinvention Brewing in Manchester and roughly 13 minutes from downtown Canandaigua. People are going to have to decide to make the trip, and Johnson and Roberge are responding by making the destination itself part of the business model.
The brewery will have a full-service kitchen and a full liquor license. There will be two bars, including one immediately adjacent to the brewing space, which Johnson wanted because he dislikes the way brewery tasting rooms can force people ordering drinks to weave through customers already sitting at the bar.
Like the interior of the property, the details matter on the outside, too. Wheel Works has roughly 800 feet of Canandaigua Lake Outlet frontage, along with a large patio, lawn space, fire areas and room for games. The three-season room will have outdoor heaters, and an event tent is planned for larger gatherings. The second bar will be available for private parties. The entire property is licensed, so customers will be able to enjoy a beer in more places than simply at a table inside the restaurant.
Johnson wants families to feel comfortable coming along, which is why the future recreation room matters as much as the kitchen or the liquor license.
“Right now it seems like breweries that are struggling have limited activities, limited food,” Johnson says. “The ones that are thriving have reasons for people to stick around for more than one beer.”
He gives me the example of going out with his wife, who doesn’t necessarily want beer. If she comes with him, he’ll have a beer, but if that’s all there is to do, she’s probably not going to want to stick around. Come for a beer, eat dinner, let the kids run around, play some lawn games, sit by the water, eventually hit a golf simulator or throw some darts. Maybe stay long enough that you need another beer.
The clearest evidence that the beer matters just as much sits in four horizontal lagering tanks, which put Wheel Works in genuinely rare company around here. Genesee has that capacity, because lagering is basically Genesee’s whole identity, and a small handful of others, like DeWolf, Spotted Octopus and Frequentem, have it too. Most new breweries don’t bother, because lagers take longer to ferment and condition than the ales that keep a young taproom’s cash flow moving, and horizontal tanks eat up floor space that could otherwise hold more fermenters. Johnson and Roberge installed them anyway, on the bet that the extra time and square footage produce a noticeably better beer than the shortcut would.
Head brewer Nick Lord, who previously worked at Other Half FLX and Fifth Frame Brewing and runs Flower City Beeworks on the side—the hives currently live on the roof of Strangebird downtown, with some possibly relocating to Shortsville—is already brewing, with a Czech Pilsner and Czech amber lager already in the tanks. Johnson is particularly fond of Czech beer and had just returned from a trip to Czechia when we spoke. The draft system will use traditional Czech-style side-pull faucets, and Lord’s honey will eventually find its way into a future Wheel Works beer.
Johnson has spent more than 40 years running a business, so he’s not unfamiliar with the risks. He knows how expensive equipment can be, and he has become sufficiently obsessed with brewery auctions that he can now tell you which shuttered breweries have equipment worth buying. (He jokes that his partners have told him, “No more auctions.”) He also seems to genuinely enjoy the challenge.
“I am a people person,” Johnson says. “It’s what I enjoy. What are our current challenges? How are the trucks running? Here, I talk to Nick and joke that I’m the assistant to the assistant brewer.”
The Shortsville Wheel Works factory has already survived manufacturing changes, a fire, decades of decline and years of vacancy. For years, it wasn’t clear what would happen to the building next. Now, Johnson and Roberge are betting that its next life can be as a brewery, restaurant and gathering place in a part of Ontario County that could use something different.
These days, Johnson says one of his favorite parts of the whole project is getting there early, before anyone else, and sitting outside with a cup of coffee looking out at the outlet.
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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