What was Scottsdale Beer Company?
For about six years the Shea Corridor had a brewery of its own, and most of the people driving past never saw it.
Scottsdale Beer Company brewed and poured at 8608 E Shea Blvd, in the Pima Crossing shopping center at the northwest corner of Shea Boulevard and Pima Road, hard against the 101. It shared a building with Pier 1 and sat so far back from the road that a Chili’s blocked it from view; the sign was visible mainly to westbound traffic. Arizona Beer Traveler, which reviewed it over three visits in 2018, opened with the line, “The city of Scottsdale has a problem. It’s called Shea Boulevard at the freeway,” and the problem was that the brewery was there and nobody could find it.
Inside it was an industrial room: metal-framed chairs and stools, corrugated sheet metal on the walls and in the restrooms, an open ceiling of exposed wooden trusses, wooden tap handles that looked hand-carved. A U-shaped bar seated about 20 to 25, standard tables ran out to a patio facing Shea, and the brewhouse stood at the back behind large windows. It made 10 to 12 styles at a time and ran guest taps, often from other Arizona breweries. The food was pub fare, burgers and sandwiches and a few salads, and the pork tacos were the thing to order.
The beer was better than the location. Cannonball, a balanced pale ale, was an award winner at the 2017 Great American Beer Festival, and the brewery marked Arizona Beer Week the next year by pouring a flight of all four Arizona GABF winners. The published record puts the opening at around 2014; nobody has printed the date. It closed in spring 2020, in the first months of the pandemic. Macayo’s has been in the space since June 2021. Our verdict: a solid neighborhood brewpub that deserved a street-front door and never got one.
How the corridor drank there
It was a locals’ room. Pima Crossing is a strip center with a Loop 101 interchange on one side and the Scottsdale Ranch and Cactus Corridor subdivisions on the others, and the brewpub’s customers were the people who lived and worked within a few miles, plus the beer travelers who had read about Cannonball and were willing to hunt for the door. Nobody drove up from Old Town for it, which is both why it stayed pleasant and why it stayed small.
Order the house beer first. With a dozen styles on at any time, the standard flight covered the range: Cannonball the pale ale, Texas Tea the chocolate imperial stout, and the roggenbier, a rye cousin of a hefeweizen at 5.3 percent that Phoenix New Times singled out in October 2016. Guest taps rotated through Arizona and national breweries; one visitor in 2018 found Hanging Cooper, a collaboration between McFate and New Mexico’s La Cumbre, on the list. Pair any of them with the pork tacos from the shareables.
Sit at the bar. The U-shaped bar was the brewery’s best seat, with a sightline through the back windows into the brewhouse and a bartender close enough to ask what was fresh. The patio was for weather. After April 2019, when the Chili’s in front came down, the patio looked across a parking lot to Shea Boulevard, and the trade-off was that you could finally see the sign from the road.
The calendar was Arizona Beer Week in February and the GABF results every fall. For what the city’s beer scene looks like now, from Goldwater in Old Town to the McFate rooms, see our guide to Scottsdale breweries and beer.
The brewpub era on Shea, and what the pandemic ended
Scottsdale Beer Company opened into the middle of Arizona’s craft-beer boom, the stretch of the 2010s when every corridor in the Valley seemed to get a brewery. On Shea it had company. Fate Brewing had started in 2012 a mile and a half west at 7337 E Shea before Steve Fate built his big brewpub on south Scottsdale Road, and Papago Brewing on McDowell Road had been the city’s beer bar since 2001. Scottsdale Beer Company was the one that was actually in Scottsdale with the city’s name on the door, a point the brewery’s name made and its location undercut.
Pima Crossing itself changed hands around it. The center sold in January 2017 for $46.15 million, and by 2021 it belonged to YAM Properties, the real-estate company of former GoDaddy chief Bob Parsons. Its restaurant row had already lost The Bamboo Club, the pan-Asian room a few doors down at 8624 E Shea, and the Chili’s demolition in April 2019 was part of the same reshuffling. A brewpub in a landlord’s reshuffling is in a weak position, and then the spring of 2020 arrived.
The closure was quiet. ABC15’s only mention came a year later, in June 2021, when it reported that Macayo’s was opening in the former Scottsdale Beer Company, which had “closed in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Macayo’s, a 75-year-old Valley chain run by Kind Hospitality’s Nava Singam, had lost its Scottsdale Road store in 2017 when the lease expired, and the brewpub’s shell gave it a way back into the city. The brewhouse windows are gone.
Honest assessment: Scottsdale Beer Company made good beer, won a national award for it, and never solved the problem in its own review’s first sentence. It was a fine place to drink if you knew where it was. It belongs on the list of every bar and club in Scottsdale as the Shea Corridor’s one real brewery, and as a warning about the back of a strip mall.