Bill Fishburn recalls sitting around a table when he was a manufacturing supervisor at Intel Corporation in DuPont in the late 1990s and daydreaming with his fellow team leaders about what would happen if the stock market took off.
“I’m gonna build a brewery,” he told them.
At the time, Fishburn, who has since his days with Intel moved to Rainier, wasn’t making a declarative statement. He always enjoyed brewing in 10-to-13-gallon batches and began when the craft beer scene was just beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Over the years, Fishburn and his wife Beth produced a National Homebrew Competition second round award-winning double IPA and had earned multiple club awards.
“At that point in time, it wasn’t so much about business. I’m not an artistic person, but it was a creative outlet, and I could make a product that I knew I enjoyed and other people would enjoy,” Fishburn said.
Over 25 years later, the Fishburns are making Bill’s dream come true.
They are working on creating Six Pennies Brewery on a property just inside Rainier city limits on state Route 507. Work began in 2021 on the website and the founder’s packages, which would allow supporters to help fund their project, and they bought their first fermenter and secured their liquor license. They had initially planned to move into the previous location of Sonja’s Cafe, and they even got up to a closing date, but the local bank they were working with backed away in October.
In August 2023, the Fishburns purchased a lot, but Bill said there was a 1973 mobile home “in really bad shape” on the 2-acre property. Over the past year, he has been working on the demolition of the mobile home, which is complete and the site is almost completely clean.
Now, he and Beth have plenty of permitting, studies and design tasks to take care of, as well as meetings with city and county planners. Bill is working with a longtime friend for the design work, and the Fishburns will hire a general contractor to help with building the brewpub.
The name Six Pennies Brewery stems from the story of their home brewery. When the Fishburns built their first keggle (brew kettle made from a keg), the cut-out top kept falling into the beer. They used JB Weld to epoxy three pennies around the perimeter of the cut-out to prevent the top from falling, but three wasn’t enough so they added three more.
Bill Fishburn said that the brewpub will likely open sometime in 2026 and will offer eight styles of beers, as well as lagers, wines and spirits. He added that Six Pennies Brewery will eventually sell barbecue food, including ribs, brisket, pulled pork, macaroni and cheese and more.
“The overall vision for it is to provide a community gathering place. We have one sit-down restaurant in town and two restaurants total,” Fishburn said. “We want to have something where people can come in and feel like they can hang out for a while, be amongst friends, family, neighbors, and have a place to go to relax and watch a game or hang out with the kids. Everything that we’re talking about doing is geared toward creating that community gathering place.”
Fishburn said that another goal of Six Pennies Brewery is to sponsor local events, including the Rainier Round-Up Days Parade, Bluegrass Festival and cornhole tournament. The excitement from the community about the brewpub has given the Fishburns confidence that their business will be successful.
“We Love Rainier invited me in a couple of months ago after I sent out some flyers, and I did a presentation about the brewery,” Fishburn said. “They were all super jazzed about it and very excited to have something like this in the community. It’s generating quite a bit of excitement and anticipation. The brewpub is gonna fail or succeed with the support of the community. As long as we have the support of Rainier and the surrounding areas, I think we’ll do really well.”
To learn more about Six Pennies Brewery, visit its website at https://www.sixpenniesbrewery.com/.
