A launch: Dorchester Brewing Company is now open And a milestone: RODE Architects celebrates 10 years

RODE Architects founders Eric Robinson, left, and Kevin Deabler spoke at a Tuesday evening event to mark their 10th anniversary inside the new Dorchester Brewing Company taproom, which they designed. Jennifer Smith photo

The newest brewery on the block has some Dorchester faces at the helm, Dorchester teams behind it, and “Dorchester” thrown up on metal script across its facade for good measure.

The Dorchester Brewing Company celebrated its ribbon cutting ceremony with Mayor Martin Walsh and other city and state officials last Wednesday morning, one day before the contract-brewery and taproom had its grand opening and launch to the neighborhood.

Co-founders Travis Lee, Todd Charbonneau, Matt Malloy, and Holly Irgens welcomed officials, investors, and members of the media into their soon-to-be-opened facility. The sprawling, 20-tap brewery is housed at 1250 Massachusetts Ave., easily discernible with its burnished and towering grain silo set off by the scripted “Dorchester” above the building’s classic glass windows.

That two of the co-founders are long-time Dorchester residents is only part of the reason they decided to open up shop in the neighborhood, Lee said. “Dorchester is a unique place. It’s a special place. It is one of Boston’s most culturally rich and diverse neighborhoods. And that we get the privilege and the opportunity to bring together all nations and languages, residents, income levels into this building, and to continue... to unite this community in the way that it’s been uniting over many years. We’re thrilled to be able to do that.”

As it starts out, Dorchester Brewing, or DBCo, is offering six house brews on tap: Clapp’s Cream Ale, V1 Double IPA Mass Ave IPA, Savin Summer Stout, Minivan Hefe, and Nitro of the Day. The menu and fresh pictures of the layout are always populated through social media.

Those six beers will soon have some hoppy, frothy company. It’s a contract-brewery, which partners with small- and medium-sized brewers to use the 25,000-square-foot production facility to produce new beers from assembling ingredients through final distribution.

The taproom is open Wednesday to Saturday from 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. and Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Expect food trucks outside daily for weekday dinner and weekend lunches. And as August rolls in, DBCo will host brewery tours and offer fresh beer to go.

A salute to RODE Architects

The brewery was in full swing this week at a Tuesday evening celebration for RODE Architects, a staple presence in development across Dorchester and the city. Savin Hill residents and long-time friends and partners Eric Robinson and Kevin Deabler toasted to “10 years of collaboration with our community partners, friends, clients, and amazing team.”

Robinson and Deabler met as undergraduates at North Carolina State University and, finding themselves together years later in Boston, they decided to open up shop together.

The first clients who hired them “were crazy enough to go to these two guys working out of a bedroom of a two-family in Dorchester and say that there was something there that we could provide for them,” Deabler said to the dozens packed into DBCo.  

Now their projects pepper the Dot landscape, including restaurants and coffee shops from Dot2Dot Cafe, to Savin Bar and Kitchen, to the brewery in which they toasted their decade of work. Their names are behind bigger developments like the sprawling Bornstein & Pearl Production Center off Quincy Street down from Grove Hall and the recently approved Dot Block mixed-use development in Glovers Corner.

They also thanked their community partner, College Bound Dorchester, selling AD/DC-styled RODE shirts to benefit the educational non-profit.

“What it took was the relationship of our clients and our neighbors and different people within our network to support us and bring us up,” Robinson said. “Because it’s about sort of building a vision together. This place is a great vision for Dorchester, and we look forward to seeing RODE Architects move forward into the future for the next 10 years.”

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