Stone Hollow Brewing Expands to Syracuse, Opening New Taphouse April 4

Stone Hollow Brewing Company's Syracuse taphouse grand opening is today, Saturday April 4, running from 1:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. The address is 448 5th St., the same building that housed Roc Hopper Brewing Company, which opened in 2019 as Otoe County's first brewery since Prohibition and built out the bar infrastructure and kitchen that Stone Hollow is now inheriting.

Bryon Belding, Stone Hollow's full-time brewer and operations manager, started brewing beers at home in Lincoln about 13 years ago before returning to his hometown of Beatrice to co-found the brewery. He is a National beer judge, and the brewing team also includes part-time brewers Jim Anciaux and Clint Bruhn, who together bring a combined 30-plus years of homebrewing experience to the production side. That homebrewing foundation is embedded in Stone Hollow's DNA, and the Syracuse move follows the same opportunistic logic: take a space where the bones are already right and the community relationship is already warm. Stone Hollow's beers were appearing on Syracuse taps as Roc Hopper's program wound down, making the transition feel organic rather than abrupt.

The taphouse will offer craft beers, ciders, seltzers, and specialty cocktails across roughly 15 handles, covering Stone Hollow's core lagers and hazy IPAs alongside seasonal releases, rotating small-batch experimentals, and an expanding hard seltzer line. The kitchen opens from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. today, serving pizzas, appetizers, sandwiches, and more. Several bartenders from Roc Hopper's operation are staying on, which should mean regulars of the old space barely feel the handoff.

Stone Hollow's Beatrice production hub, located in the city's 140-year-old Mercantile Building at Third and Court streets, remains the brewing operation feeding both locations. The Syracuse taphouse functions as a satellite pour experience rather than a standalone brewery, extending the brand's geographic reach into Otoe County without requiring a full second production build-out.

For homebrewers looking to reverse-engineer something from the tap list, Belding's hazy IPA program is the most technically instructive target. His background as a certified beer judge gives Stone Hollow's hoppy offerings a dialed-in bitterness balance and dry-hop profile that tends to distinguish brewery-trained palates from untrained ones. The Mummy Trail IPA has enough local lore attached to it that asking Belding about the name might be the most effective way to get him talking about the recipe. The lagers, built on a homebrewing foundation with 30-plus combined years of team experience, are the other style worth benchmarking against your own fermentation setup.

Stone Hollow's entry into Otoe County fills the gap Roc Hopper leaves while adding the production depth of an established multi-brewer operation. Doors open at 1 p.m. at 448 5th St. in Syracuse, Nebraska.