Buckner's Brewing Co. has begun making beer

Just shy of three years after Buckner shut its doors, the smell of brewing beer is in the air again at the building at the corner of Main Street and Broadway in Cape Girardeau.

The new incarnation of the business, now owned by Dr. Sonjay Fonn, will be known as Buckner's Brewing Co.

Brewmaster Mike Mills said the new Buckner's beers will be brewed with as many local ingredients as possible.

Mike Mills, brewmaster at Buckner's, checks the temperature in the brew kettle Tuesday in downtown Cape Girardeau. Mills was brewing a batch of Bee's Sneeze Honey Wheat beer. (Laura Simon)

For instance, the Old Man River's Breakfast Stout is planned using fresh coffee from Parengo Coffee in Sikeston, Missouri.

Spent grain will be sent to Family Friendly Farm.

Plans for other beers include the Bee's Sneeze Honey Wheat, Trader's Post Saison, Floodgate IPA and Flood Stage Double IPA, Mills said.

Buckner's first will open as a tasting room while the rest of the building undergoes renovations, Mills said. There will be seating for about 30 people indoors, with some additional outdoor seating.

"We'll go ahead and do some distribution as well, so it's our intent to go ahead and open quite a few [tap] accounts around town," Mills said. "In time, we'll bottle, but as of right now, we don't have the space for that."

He said the former Ragsdales, however, has a room that will fit the brewery's space needs for bottling.

Mills said food catered by The Bar and Stevie's Steakburger, both of which also are owned by Fonn, will be available when the tasting room opens.

"So that will be an option for patrons that want to come in and eat and drink," Mills said. "As far as having in-house food cooked, we're not going to have that right now. We're focusing on the beer and then the renovations on that side of the building."

The building's downstairs bar, Ragsdales, is next on the list in terms of building renovations, Mills said.

"The fluidity of the whole thing, that you can come one place and get two different atmospheres, is awesome, I think," he said. "And we're certainly going to want to bring that back."

Mills said the goal is to have the Buckner dining room, which still will have a stage, serve a bit of a different crowd from the Ragsdales bar crowd.

"It makes more sense for the 30-something crowd to have a place to sit and eat and drink and just enjoy the music, as opposed to trying to cram people into a bar," he said, adding the business plans to have a stage at Ragsdales again as well.

The River View Room, on the top floor of the Buckner building, may see a few changes. But, Mills said, no definitive plans are in place.

"It's one of the things I really want to do, is ... bring life to all the Cape history," Mills said. Today, he's working on the Trader's Post Saison, which Mills said is an homage to Jean Girardot, the French soldier who established a trading post in 1733 at what now is known as Cape Rock.

"Bringing that little piece of history to the table, it just helps really reinforce that Cape's a neat old place that's got a lot of cool history to it," Mills said.

The former Buckner Brewing Co. and Ragsdale's closed Feb 4, 2013.

The historic building opened as the Buckner-Ragsdale clothing store in the early 1900s, eventually closing in 1982. A number of shorter-term ventures occupied the building until Phil Brinson and Mark Sprigg bought the building in 1998. Brinson and Sprigg won the John Boardman Award for Excellence in Rehabilitation from Old Town Cape in 2004 for their transformation of the 23,000-square-foot space.

It grew to contain Ragsdale's and the River View Room in addition to the microbrewery.

kwebster@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3646

Pertinent address:

132 N. Main St., Cape Girardeau, MO