The Route 66 town of Springfield, Missouri, later this year will open its fourth microbrewery in a site that once was one of the region’s big radio stations.
Lost Signal Brewing Co. will open at 610 W. College St. (aka Route 66), reported the Springfield News-Leader.
Named because the 3,200-square-foot building it will occupy was the longtime home of AM top 40 station KICK (a stalwart part of Route 66 where Jim Bohannon, Les Garland and Woody P. Snow spent time early in their careers), Lost Signal will have an 800-square-foot brewing area and will serve “low-and-slow” cooked barbecue, Hoke said.
Having a barbecue smoker on site will allow for some unusual beers, he said. “We’ll do some in-house smoked malts, smoked wheat, smoked pecan porter.”
A detailed history about the KICK station may be read here. The station started in 1947, but hit its stride in the mid-1950s as a Top 40 pop station and launched a lot of radio careers until it went dark in 1991.
The other microbreweries in Springfield are Mother’s Brewing Co., Springfield Brewing Co. and White River Brewing Co. Mother’s distributes its beers as far east as St. Louis.
But the owner of Lost Signal says it will keep its beer sales entirely within its premises; he’ll be a small-batch brewer.
Lost Signal reportedly will open by late fall.
Incidentally, the number of breweries in the U.S. passed the 4,000 mark last fall and likely will pass the all-time documented high of 4,131 in 1873. The count passed the 3,000 mark in mid-2014.
(Image of varieties of microbrewery beer by James Palinsad via Flickr)