The East Hampton Town Planning Board will hold a public hearing Wednesday on the proposed Springs Brewery, at 847 Springs-Fireplace Road.
For the last 35 years, the site has operated as the Hampton Auto Collision Shop.
Lindsay Reichart, and her partner, Gunnar Burke, plans to remodel her father’s auto body shop and have made multiple presentations to the planning board over the last year and a half. They’ve tweaked plans and even successfully challenged a building inspector’s determination that a “tasting room” was a bar.
“There will be no running tabs like you would see at a bar use,” Christopher Stoecker, a town planner, said at the May 6 meeting.
They also changed the landscaping plan and have had to be flexible to comply with town coverage restrictions. Most recently, they removed grass strips from the driveway, replaced them with gravel, and added some green space along a property line.
By taking a dumpster enclosure inside, the brewery also saved some outside space. “We plan to deal with the waste internally,” Mr. Burke told the board. “The majority of the waste will be spent grain that will be picked up regularly by a local farm.”
The planning board now considers the application complete and ready to be shown to the public.
Lou Cortese, a member of the planning board, admitted that it had been a “rough road” for the proposed brewery. The board has reviewed the plans four times.
The renovation of the building split it into two uses. In the rear, beer will be brewed; in a front retail space, it will be tasted and sold. Patrons are expected to buy beer, mainly to go, but there will be limited seating.
The brewery now outsources brewing to Riverhead, but once the building is complete, Ms. Reichart and Mr. Burke expect to produce all beer in house.
“I would like to see the operation of the brewery subject to what’s been outlined operationally in your narrative,” said Ed Krug, the planning board chairman. “I think it’s important on the operations piece of it that a future owner, perhaps not sort of misinterpret what the tasting room was really meant for, and kind of keeps it in the spirit that we all have agreed to.”
Whatever the outcome of Wednesday’s public hearing, the brewery still needs approval from the town’s architectural review board and the Suffolk County Board of Health, for its sanitary system.
