Future Days Beer Co. opens Thursday in a renovated carriage house in Northern Liberties, but its original home was much more modest. The brewery was born in an off-campus apartment near Fordham University in the Bronx, where two college juniors decided to give beer-making a spin.
"We had a huge pot that we were using on the stove," Sean McGuire, one of those home brewers, remembered. "And then in order to cool everything down to ferment, we had to soak it in a bathtub full of ice cubes. It was insanely rudimentary, but we were young and dumb and excited to try to make beer."
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McGuire and Nick Mata have learned a lot since then, and are ready to show off their skill at their first (official) storefront. The pair is set to launch Future Days at 433 Fairmount Ave. with four – possibly five – beers on tap and many more to come.
The brewery's future wasn't always guaranteed. After brewing and rooming together at Fordham, the duo split to pursue careers in finance and accounting. They picked up the project again about five years after graduation, making batches in Mata's Long Island garage. It became a weekend ritual, even as McGuire followed his wife, a Bucks County native, to Connecticut and then Philadelphia.
"It was not fun," McGuire admitted. "I would wake up at like 3:00 a.m. just so that I could get out there by like six or seven and avoid all of the traffic."
But the buzz grew as they hosted tastings and won home-brewing awards for a couple of their early creations. McGuire picked up some commercial experience at Half Full Brewery in Stamford, Connecticut. Then, once he'd settled in Philly, he convinced Mata to join him and go all in on Future Days.
The partners plunged into the project headfirst, quitting their day jobs to focus on fixing up the Fairmount Avenue property.
"It was a total shell, and had been vacant actually for 15 years prior, which was both good and bad," McGuire said. "Good in that we could do whatever we wanted to make it the exact brewery and the exact tasting room that we wanted. But bad in that it was gonna take us quite a bit of time. I think we underestimated how long it would actually take."
Now, a full decade after their bathtub beer, McGuire and Mata are ready to launch Future Days. The brewery will be open Thursdays through Sundays and initially offer two hazy pale ales, a West Coast pale ale and the flagship Future Days Kölsh to start. (McGuire teased a possible fifth beer by the weekend.) And while its owners hope the place will become a fun place to hang – they'll have a pool table and Eagles games on the TV – they mainly hope to cultivate a reputation among beer drinkers.
"We're not gonna stop at solid, decent, you know, that beer's okay," McGuire said. "We got into this because we wanted to make really, really good beer. We've drank really good beer. We know what it tastes like. So our overarching mission is to brew great beer that Philadelphia could be proud of, that we could be proud of. We want it to be some of the best beer in Philly when all is said and done."
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