Division Brewing crafts community in downtown Arlington
Class of ’88 alumnus Kyle Fuller has made a point to stop by Division Brewing almost every Friday since the year it opened. What has kept Fuller coming back for 10 years is bigger than the taste and variety of India pale ale, stout and sour beers brewed in-house. It’s the environment he’s greeted with weekly. “Not only is it the only brewery in Arlington, it’s very much a community feel,” he said. “I feel like I’m home here. Every time I walk in here, the owners Wade and Sean, are happy to greet me.” Wade Wadlington and Sean Cooley founded Division Brewing located at E. Main Street in 2015. As home brewers, they fell in love with beer making. A decade later, their careful attention to crafting a good beer and curating a welcoming spot in downtown Arlington has helped Division Brewing receive the best brewery in North Texas honor from KERA readers in February. When Cooley began brewing beer around 20 years ago, he said his hobby became real early in the craft beer industry. He said the beginning was a very exciting time when there was a variety of new flavors to try and explore in craft beer. Early on, however, craft beer wasn’t popular in Texas. “Those early days of craft beer, trying all these new flavors, but then not being able to find them easily at the store," Cooley said. "You’re like, ‘Well, I guess I’m gonna try and make it.” He said he and Wadlington began brewing together through a mutual friend. They started by brewing for themselves and their friends, hosting tastings and cookouts to have them try the brews. “That began an email list to keep people updated with when the next tasting is going to be,” Cooley said. “Then once you get 75, 80 people in your house, your wives start telling you to take this somewhere else.” Cooley said he didn’t know their hobby would become a career. It was just a fun pastime. Growing up in Arlington and having briefly attended UTA, Wadlington said the pair knew they wanted to open their business in the city. At first, when they were looking for a space, they focused on the best place for beer production, not intending it to become a venue itself. They weren’t expecting to change from being open one day a week to five based on demand. “We still struggle at times, and we’re busy to keep up with the demand,” Wadlington said. “Right now, we have a spot for 10 different or maybe more IPAs, and we only have four because we’ve sold beer so quickly.” Cooley said they’re a very small and local business in the grand scheme of craft brewers — you have to come in person and drink from the tap. He said he prefers it that way so they can brew more often, keep their beer fresh and have a larger selection to choose from. Instead of only having four core beers in a season, Cooley said they wanted to do more. “We were one of the first in the market to say, ‘No, we want to have 20 beers on tap, and we’re going to try and do what we can to make that happen all the time,’” he said. Wadlington said they were never afraid to break the mold in the brewing industry. Inspired by different breweries, Cooley and Wadlington traveled to Colorado and California, where the craft beer scene was ahead of Texas at the time of their visit, a decade ago. Professional brewing has a learning curve, and while each brewer has a recipe and style, there are basic, necessary fundamentals to follow. Every brew day, on Wednesdays, Wadlington wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to arrive at the brewery at 5 a.m. With the process taking hours to complete, he likes to start early before opening at 5 p.m. Cooley said in the simplest form, beer starts with malted barley, which provides sugars. Yeast ferments these sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Hop pellets, made from a plant, are then added to impart bitterness and flavor to the beer. “With craft beer, you take that process and then you go wild,” he said. “We’re just exploring all kinds of fruits, spices, herbs, chocolates, any flavor you can think of, we’re throwing it at a beer to see what it’s like.” The brewing process takes about eight to 10 hours, but the batch isn’t used for about 21 days, Cooley said. The batch will ferment for two weeks and then be conditioned another week to two weeks after. “It’s a process. You can’t be impatient and do this,” Cooley said. “A lot of work goes into whenever you’re drinking a beer that’s poured for you in a glass.” What makes Division Brewing unique, apart from its beer, is the two other businesses they opened alongside the brewery. The space next to the brewery used to be a boutique, and after it shut down, Cooley and Wadlington decided to turn it into Growl Records in 2017. Classic original CDs and records are sold and there is a stage for bands to perform. “The Growl brings in a whole group of people that wouldn’t necessarily even visit a craft brewery,” Wadlington said. When a restaurant next door closed, they decided to take the opportunity and start selling and in-house pizzas in 2022. Wadlington makes all the pizza dough, he said. He traveled to Chicago and Wisconsin to ensure his pizza tastes like where the best is served. He worked hard to perfect the thin-crust pizza. While every day may be a little different, they works to make it consistently as good. “We’re just doing things that we like. We like music, we like records, we like pizza, we like beer,” Cooley said. “It may seem odd, like ‘What? A brewery is doing a record shop?’ but it’s like, no, it’s just us. We just like doing the things that we enjoy doing.” Having three businesses that come together brings in a unique demographic. With the brewery bringing in the older crowd and the pizza restaurant and record store bringing in families and younger kids, the whole community can congregate in one spot. “Call me old-fashioned, but it’s important that people share a space together,” Cooley said. “To have a pub to go and get to know each other, to have a place to see live music. It’s important and people gravitate towards that.” Marcus Stephens, Clayton Wills and Hunter Lawson come to Division Brewery every two to three weeks. The combination of being a relaxed hang-out spot with a good variety of craft beer and a patio kept this brewery in their rotation. “Up until we found this place, we had no idea something like this was back here,” Stephens said. “It’s kind of a crown jewel of Arlington, it really is.” Lawson was surprised to find not many UTA students visit the spot. He said it left him thinking how one misses these places. Fuller said that there wasn’t a place like Division Brewing when he was a student at UTA in the mid to late ’80s. He said they had J. Gilligan’s Bar & Grill and J. R. Bentley’s, but a brewery has a different vibe to it. “It’s not a restaurant. It’s not a fancy bar, we’re sitting on stools here,” he said. “We can just have a beer and be ourselves.” @amandaLaldridge news-editor.shorthorn@uta.edu
News Center home
