Christopher Taylor
Melissa Leigh Faulkner of Om Brewers.
Taverns have long been places to gather for a game of pool or sheepshead. In the past decade, trivia nights have become super popular. But 21st-century craft breweries are not limiting themselves to games. These days, there’s not too much that doesn’t go better with a pint.
Melissa Faulkner started Om Brewers, a travelling pop-up yoga studio that meets in unconventional locations — like breweries — in 2017. Now, it’s her full-time job.
If you think this sounds like a recipe for some tipsy downward face-planting dogs, that’s not how it works. “You won’t be drinking in warrior,” says Faulkner. “The drinking starts after.”
Yoga at breweries is not a new idea, but it’s usually one yoga teacher who has made a connection with one local brewery, says Faulkner. Om Brewers is, as far as Faulkner knows, one of just three businesses nationally dedicated to teaching yoga primarily in breweries, with no standalone brick-and-mortar studio. And the two others — one in Seattle and another in San Diego — are not full-time gigs for their owners.
These are not always small classes — they can reach 50 people, depending on space. “It keeps me pretty busy, with prep and travel,” says Faulkner. She has a bit of a circuit set up that encompasses Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis and Duluth.
“Yoga with anything has become really popular in the last five years,” says Faulkner. “It became like the cure-all… slap yoga on it and everything will get better.” That’s coincided with the rise in craft breweries. “Doing a physical exercise and then drinking afterwards is not a unique concept. Work out and then immediately have your reward. Take a yoga class and then go to happy hour.”
Breweries tend to be wonderful spaces in which to hold a yoga class, says Faulkner: “Any place that is beautiful, big and unique,” is a natural fit, she says. Craft breweries are often in older, restored buildings with high ceilings and lots of windows — beautiful venues that do not have a lot going on during regular business hours, she notes.
Often the yoga class takes place in the hour before the taproom opens. Then, as regular customers drift in, class members stay for the beer that’s included in the price of the class, and maybe another — “It’s very fun and lively. There’s tons of socializing and interfacing with people who just walked in,” Faulkner says — so the uninitiated learn about yoga, too.
Participants tend to be one person who is heavily involved in yoga and a second person, a friend or partner, who is just experimenting with the practice.
Faulkner recognizes that a regular yoga studio can be intimidating: “They speak a language that is completely foreign to an average person. If you don’t know the poses, you feel like an idiot, and of course that’s not the point.” Having a class in a brewery is “immediately reassuring that it’s okay to make mistakes,” Faulkner says. “The energy is already different.”
Om Brewers has visited Working Draft, Octopi, Giant Jones and the Hop Garden in Paoli (where an outdoor class on the banks of the Sugar River is planned for later this spring) as well as Old Sugar Distillery.
Faulkner sees bringing yoga into these more social venues as “doing wonders from a community standpoint in terms of getting [yoga] students to meet people, but it’s also a way to promote local business. I’m a local business owner, helping other local businesses — and that’s a really powerful thing. ‘How can I use my people and bring more people to you?’ A community without walls is really what we are trying to build.”
Christopher Taylor
Faulkner leads a yoga class at Working Draft Beer on East Wilson Street.
Yoga is ideal because the only equipment is generally a mat that students bring themselves. But it’s not the only exercise class migrating to breweries. “Pilates & Pints” is a thing. Cold Iron Brewing of Ironwood, Michigan, hosts indoor cycling classes, where participants bring their own bikes and the class leader sets them up on stationary trainers.
Cold Iron also hosts a monthly instructional series called Tech on Tap, in collaboration with Northern Michigan University.
Central Waters Brewing of Plover, Wisconsin, hosts a series of science talks on the second Sunday of the month. They’re called Tap Talks, “playing off TED Talks,” says brewery president Paul Graham. “I grew up going to Mayo Clinic Sigma Xi Community lectures,” says Graham. “Education is key.” The Tap Talks introduce people to ideas they might not otherwise be exposed to, Graham says, and this year Central Waters has received grant money to bring professors up from Madison. Some recent topics have included managing deer and wolf populations with UW-Madison professor Tim Van Deelen of the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology; agricultural water pollution, groundwater withdrawals and more from Shannon Thielman of Wisconsin’s Green Fire; and the salting of our lakes from UW-Madison limnologist Hilary Dugan, an assistant professor of integrative biology.
There are new frontiers of retail to be found in craft beer taprooms, too. Andy Fischer of Fischer Family Farm has been working with Madison’s Karben4 Brewing since before it opened six years ago. Fischer takes the brewery’s spent grain and feeds it to his farm animals. He also provides the meat for the Karben4 kitchen. “It’s a full-circle concept where you can have a beer and a sandwich and it all has a story behind it,” says Fischer. “It’s been a nice relationship.”
Fischer has also held meat raffles and “meat bingo” at Karben4 (as well as at Working Draft) — events that may dovetail more closely with the concept of traditional Wisconsin tavern events. “Meat raffles are a lot of fun, and they get people involved,” says Fischer.
But he also has adapted for his own use a much more contemporary type of event, the “pop-up,” a temporary retail site that offers customers a little something extra. On select Sundays Fischer holds meat pop-ups at breweries, selling his dry-aged beef, pastured pork, chicken and eggs. “I set up a table, I bring the freezer or coolers with me, and it’s like a mini farmers’ market as you walk into the brewery,” says Fischer. Plus there can be added incentives: “Maybe if you buy $50 worth of stuff you get a beer token from the brewery or a gift card.” In this way, he says, local businesses work together to help each other out.
“It’s nice to see people,” says Fischer. “And they appreciate that this is real food.”
[Editor's note: This article has been corrected to note that Melissa Leigh Faulkner's last name is Faulkner, not Leigh.]
