Georgetown Brewing expands across the street to meet rising demand

Georgetown Brewing has bought the building at 620 S. Brandon Street, directly across from its 5200 Denver Avenue South campus in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood, adding 36,544 square feet to one of the city’s best-known independent breweries. Co-founder Roger Bialous tied the purchase to rising production and cold-storage needs, and said the building should be fully operational in about a year.

The move keeps the company on the same block it has occupied for years, but with more room to keep growing. Georgetown’s existing brewery and tasting room campus, the Olson Kundig transformation of a former warehouse, covers 89,471 square feet. The new property is the kind of expansion mature craft brewers rarely get to make anymore: close enough to fold into the current operation, large enough to matter, and tied directly to demand rather than speculation.

That demand still starts with Bodhizafa IPA. Georgetown’s brewery facts page says Bodhizafa accounted for 55 percent of total production in 2024, making the beer the engine behind the brewery’s physical growth. Georgetown sold 122,200 barrels that year, used 9,114,433 pounds of malt and 506,142 pounds of hops, and filled 24,663,402 cans. Manny’s Pale Ale also remained a major piece of the portfolio, at 13 percent of total production, or 34 percent of draft production.

Bodhizafa’s rise has given Georgetown a flagship strong enough to bankroll more than just brewhouse output. The IPA, released in 2015, won gold in the American Style IPA category at the 2016 Great American Beer Festival and has become the beer most closely associated with the brewery’s scale. Georgetown’s distribution now reaches Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Japan, a footprint that helps explain why the company can still justify buying industrial real estate in its home neighborhood while many peers are retrenching.

The brewery has also pushed beyond beer. Georgetown acquired Timber City Ginger Beer in October 2024 and has said it plans to keep growing that business. Founded in 2002, Georgetown sold its first keg on Feb. 27, 2003, to the Latona Pub, and the expansion across Denver Avenue keeps that origin story intact, only bigger, with more cold storage and more production space waiting just across the street.