THE MODERN STORY OF THIS SPACE on the Old Town Silverdale waterfront reportedly dates back to the early 1900’s when the small Central Kitsap farming community was given the moniker ‘The Egg Capital Of The World.’ Back then, it’s said the space was first occupied by the Silverdale Poultry Cooperative Association, then the Washington State Coop, as a receiving and staging area for hundreds of thousands of eggs which would be shipped across the country from the Dyes Inlet dock during the 1920s and 30s.
But we’re gonna pick the story up in the early 2000s.
In 2006, new owners at this Byron Street building, known as the Seaport building, converted what was then a sandwich shop into a wine and martini bar with the goal of creating a city-like nightclub experience in Old Town Silverdale. Over the past two decades, that restaurant, The Old Town Bistro, has been the building’s longest-running tenant, having spent eight years in the space. The Bistro endured a reputation for late night bar fights including one in which a person who was arrested following a brawl kicked out the window in the back of a cop car with their bare feet. Later, the Bistro rebranded as a family-friendly restaurant-by-day and 21-plus night club-by-night before closing in 2014 following a lawsuit over unpaid construction contracts and what the local paper reported as a ‘contentious eviction.’
A year later, in 2015, the owner of a Port Orchard sports bar formerly called Tommy C’s moved into the Silverdale space.
After facing an eviction from the bank-owned building it had occupied in Port Orchard, the owner rebranded his business to Cash Brewing, constructing a three-barrel brewhouse at the Byron Street location and renovating the interior of the building with a sports bar motif. Cash would build its reputation over the next few years in the local brewing community and expand to a seven-barrel system before selling the business in late 2019, shortly before a lawsuit would be filed against the brewery by the Johnny Cash estate for trademark infringement. They’d been using the trademarked Johnny Cash logo as their own, with the brewery’s owner claiming he was a distant relative of the man in black.
Cash Brewing sold the business quietly, before news of the lawsuit went public, to a husband-and-wife couple who lived in Kingston and had planned to build a brewery with their retirement savings. For the Kingston couple, the Byron Street building seemed too good to be true. The brewing equipment was already in place. The cost was within their budget. They signed the contract, redesigned the interior, created a new menu, branded themselves Barred Brewing and opened to the public in January 2020…
The next month, the lawsuit against Cash went public. The month after that, the covid lockdown was enacted. With unprecedented complications from a global pandemic in addition to lingering litigation against Cash, on top of unexpected costs accrued from undisclosed infrastructure upgrades needed for the building, the couple had expended most of their savings and sold the business within the year.
In 2021, the space reopened as Breaking Waves Brewing. Again: New menu. New interior design. New beers. Rebranded. Plagued by road construction, that brewery would also close within a year.
In 2022, a Tacoma group—which owned Harmon Brewing and a chain of restaurants called The Hub—moved into the Silverdale location, planned to resurrect some of the old Harmon Brewery beers and re-opened the space as The Hub Byron Street in August. Later that fall, the restaurant would suffer two subsequent brewery fires shortly after the general manager who had spearheaded the project was found dead by suicide in the apartment above the space.
The building went back on the market in July 2023.
ENTER: PENINSULA BEVCO… Sitting in that same second floor apartment, Cody Morgan—the 32-year-old de-facto CEO of the building’s new tenant, Port Orchard’s Peninsula Beverage Collective—is working on payroll for the company’s roster of now 45 employees. After congratulating how much their business has grown in the past five years, I ask if he’s considered that this building might be cursed.
“Oh, you mean, like the ghosts?” he thinks about it. “I don’t really believe in ghosts. I mean, when you get into a space where someone has died, it kind of makes you think about it a little bit differently… but, yeah, I’m not worried about a curse. I think it’s all in the energy you bring to it.”
Since its inception, Peninsula BevCo, which is run by a collective of locally-based owners, has been intensely focused on the energy it contributes to its community through its flagship location in downtown Port Orchard. Following the company’s beginnings as a taproom in Manchester, the BevCo has been revered for its ‘vibe’ and ‘community-over-profit’ mentality since moving into its first downtown location in 2019. Shortly thereafter, the BevCo relocated to its current building in the parking lot across from the Port Orchard ferry dock.
Staring out the window of the apartment above their new spot in Silverdale, looking out at Dyes Inlet, daydreaming about a time when both BevCo locations might potentially be connected exclusively by ferry travel, Cody says, “This is an opportunity that just came up. There’s a little bit of destiny involved in a lot of the story along the BevCo way…”
It all began about a decade ago, he said, when he was involved in his first home-brewed batch of beer.
“Now, it’s a part of something bigger,” he thinks back. “It’s always been a part of something bigger. But that was my first passion of where it was coming from, you know, it was fun to be with my friends, making beer… and then you make a dream of that. You know… What if I could do this for a living?… What if I could? … Could I do this? …
“So it started with the homebrew, and the dream, and committing to it, and then it was like, you’re just gonna go full send, every day?” he laughs.
After graduating from South Kitsap High School in 2010, Cody said he dabbled in business with a small painting company and spent years taking college courses through Western Washington University, Olympic College and, eventually, the University of Washington. One quarter shy of his degree, he dropped out. As he tells it, he’d narrowly missed entrance into business school a couple of times. One day, one of the deans from the program at UW visited the class to talk with students about future plans and told Cody he didn’t necessarily need business school for his plans in entrepreneurship.
“And I dropped out the next day,” Cody said.
In doing so, he also had to pay back his student loans in full for not finishing the semester. He said he worked multiple jobs to pay the money back. Exploring his interest in the beverage world, Cody worked as a bartender at Port Orchard’s Whiskey Gulch Coffeepub, and, for about a year, at the now-closed Hale’s Ales’ Barrelhouse in West Bremerton as well as the now-closed World Of Beer chain once located at the Kitsap Mall, before the launch of Peninsula BevCo in 2018.
Adding to a growing list of ventures, last year, the BevCo launched a home-brew store—Peninsula Homebrew—offering beer-making ingredients, equipment and rental systems adjacent to the flagship restaurant and bottle shop. In a separate venture last summer, Cody and another partner also recently leased a multi-use warehouse space in another Port Orchard building with plans to house a local podcast studio and create a co-working and events space for local entrepreneurs. Shortly after that lease was finalized, the Byron Street brewery building came back on the market just as the BevCo had been approved for a $150K small business loan—almost the exact asking price for the brewery, Cody said. The serendipitous opportunity—with a seven-barrel brewhouse, six fermentors, three brite tanks and other brewery equipment in place—fell right in line with BevCo’s mission of creating a ‘community around beer.’
“I’ve always thought that we could make a community that brews beer for the community,” Cody says, speaking to plans for the Brewhouse and thinking back to the home-brew experience that started it all. “Instead of just one or two people brewing, it’s a community of brewers.”
He’s hoping the new Peninsula Brewhouse can work in tandem with Peninsula Homebrew, inviting local amateur brewers to guest brew, hosting home brew competitions and community tap-takeover nights. But the permitting process for the brewery side is still in the works, he said, while the new location focuses on staffing, creating and executing a new menu alongside their flagship staples. Within the first month of being open to the public in Silverdale, Cody says he spent the first two weeks out on a covid quarantine. Then, the building suffered a burst pipe in the fire suppression system during mid-January’s cold snap.
With any luck, I say, that’s just the old ghosts of the building making their way out. Cody looks at it as a positive experience that enabled staff to deal with adversities on their own.
At this point in ‘the BevCo way,’ he said he’s focused on delegating responsibilities and reflecting on the notion that the best creative ideas and problem-solving solutions in a restaurant often come from the collective. And I’m hoping if anyone can break the curse of this brewery on Byron Street, it might just be these kids from Port Orchard. // BILL MAN
CHECK OUT PENINSULA BEVCO at the new Peninsula Brewhouse in Silverdale or their flagship location in Port Orchard. More at peninsulabevco.com and on the socials @peninsulabevco
