All About Urban Artifact

To understand Urban Artifact is to dig deeply into their slogan, which is ‘Wild Culture’.  You can take the easy road, and just know that the brewery makes all of their beer to reside somewhere on the “wild and tart” spectrum.  Sour beer… Funky Beer… it’s 100% their realm, and they do it extremely well.  But that’s just the easy route.  Urban Artifact’s Wild Culture extends much deeper than just the beer that they make, it permeates every aspect of the brewery.

People told them they were crazy for attempting this project.  They said that this couldn’t ever work in a city like Cincinnati.  The brewery has live music every day of the week… and a pretty eclectic lineup at that.  Rock, Hip Hop, Blues and Big Band, you’ll find it all from time to time… it’s weird.  Urban Artifact doesn’t just embrace the weirdness of it all, they thrive in the weirdness, and use it to push what they do into places that other people wouldn’t dare tread.

What’s Urban Artifact Like?

The taproom itself is in an old church.  The basement is where the taproom resides, the upstairs sanctuary has become a performance and event space.  The old gymnasium is where the actual brewery is.  And that’s not even talking about the actual beers they make.  They famously use real fruit instead of leaning on flavorings and extracts, regardless of how much harder that makes things.  They’ve made a beer using the heat from old granite blocks they dug up during construction.  They sourced yeast from the Museum center to make a collaboration beer.  They made a beer that tastes like a pickle.  None of it is “normal”, and that’s what made me fall in love with these folks.

Visit the Brewery’s website for a lot more information about the brewery, and what they are doing!

The Urban Artifact Timeline

  • April, 2015 – The Brewery opens their doors
  • December, 2016 – The first cans are released (have a look at their packaged releases)
  • April, 2017 – The first barrel aged sours are released.
  • November, 2017 – The very first spontaneously fermented sour beer is released.
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