Phoenixville’s cocktail haven is getting a glitzy $2 million upgrade (and pizza)

In 2014, one of the first buildings you saw when you crossed over the Schuylkill into downtown Phoenixville — one of the Philly suburbs’ most up-and-coming towns — was an abandoned laundromat. The low-slung Bridge Street building had stood empty, paint peeling from the garage doors, for 12 years when Jared Adkins approached township officials about opening a distillery in the Chester County borough. They welcomed him with open arms, and the run-down brick box at 100 Bridge Street became home to what would become Bluebird Distilling. There were still racks of clothes on hangers when Adkins moved in.

Adkins and his father renovated the space over the course of a year, installing a German-made copper still, which started cranking out Bluebird’s first batches of booze in March 2015. When Bluebird opened its tasting room three months later, it was an instant hit. Rather than serve up small sips of its spirits — as many distilleries did at the time — it stirred and shook them into full-fledged cocktails. Locals loved it: So many people showed up to the 44-seat bar that first night, the building’s old pipes couldn’t keep up.

“With that volume of stuff going down the drain, everything backed up, flooded out completely the first night,” Adkins remembers. “We’re serving people in inch-deep water for the entire place, [but] no one would stop coming in.”

In the years since, Bluebird has grown in every way. The company opened a pair of coffee shop/cocktail bar concepts, Char & Stave, in Ardmore and Chestnut Hill, adding a coffee roastery to the Phoenixville’s headquarters in the process. The distillery’s portfolio is one of the most diverse in the Philadelphia region, with dozens of spirits, from an eight-year-old bourbon and American single-malt whiskey to ghost pepper agave and honeycomb gin. Bluebird distills 12,000 to 15,000 gallons of booze a year, distributing in 42 states through direct shipping as well as throughout Pennsylvania via state-owned liquor stores. Still, the business’ strongest source of revenue comes directly from sales at Char & Stave and the Phoenixville tasting room.

While Bluebird’s original still is big enough to keep up, the same can’t be said of the Phoenixville tasting room. Adkins has been playing a perpetual game of catch-up, gradually transforming the 8,000-square-foot space over the past decade so it can accommodate more and more customers. Within a month or two of opening to the public, he cleared room in a barrel storage area to add more seating. Then he built an outdoor deck in the parking lot for warm-weather seating; that space was eventually walled off to make a three-season patio. Picnic tables claimed what was left of the parking lot. Today, the distillery has 160 seats in all.

Adkins isn’t content to stop there. In fact, he’s ready to redo the entire place: Bluebird is undertaking $2 million makeover that includes building out a new bar area, dining room, and an open kitchen designed for making Neapolitan-style pizza from scratch. Construction is anticipated to start in the next month, though Adkins intends to keep Bluebird open to the public throughout the process. When work is complete — hopefully by the end of 2025 — the new bar/restaurant will reopen as Bluebird Social: Cocktails & Kitchen by Bluebird Distilling.

Bluebird is working with Philly-based pizza consultant Gregorio Fierro (who’s advised the bread-obsessed owners of Angelo’s and Del Rossi’s) to map out the kitchen and develop recipes for the forthcoming house-made pies. Besides pizza, the menu will include appetizers, salads, sandwiches on house-baked bread, and desserts, along with beer and wine.

The cocktails — the list has upward of 60 options now, from straightforward house classics like the Gin N’ Juice (Juniperus Gin, cucumber juice, lime, sugar) to seasonal specials like the TKO (coconut milk-clarified agave spirit, peaflower, pineapple, fresh citrus) — aren’t going anywhere. Bluebird’s bartenders will take center stage in the reworked patio, which will be converted into the building’s bar. The first phase of the renovation project, the patio will close in June so it can be fully insulated and bricked in. When that’s done, the room will be anchored by a rectangular, granite-topped bar with seating on all sides and a floating metal rack to display Bluebird’s booze lineup.

Next, Bluebird’s barrel room will be turned into a dining room with a vapor fireplace, barrel staves that run from floor to ceiling, and a wall-to-wall wool banquette. Finally, the current tasting room will be overhauled — expanding the retail area and adding the open kitchen (complete with an Italian-made bread and pizza oven) plus more seating.

The revamp is spearheaded by architect Paul Salvaggio and interior designer Michael Gruber (Vetri restaurants, Phoenixville’s Bistro on Bridge). Fishtown design firm True Hand, which has been working with Bluebird for a few years, will also contribute decorative elements.

The patio will be closed in the summer, but Bluebird’s outdoor tables won’t be affected, nor will the mobile bar the distillery runs during Phoenixville’s popular Inside Out weekends, when Bridge Street is shut down to cars. Some features of the new bar have already been completed off-site, thanks to Adkin’s 80-year-old dad, who used to run his own construction company and has never fully taken to retirement.

Before starting Bluebird in 2014, Adkins, a Skippack native, supervised production and packaging lines for Pepsi, Nestle, and Victory Brewing. He had been a home-brewer but saw the crowded field of craft breweries and decided to join the then relatively nascent Pennsylvania distilling scene instead, initially with the intent to make spirits primarily for wholesale. As the renovations of 100 Bridge Street progressed, Adkins’ thinking evolved.

“We have this tasting room. I’d like to do cocktails. Didn’t know much about them, and then I started going online,” Adkins remembers. He hired New York-based cocktail consultant Brian Van Flandern to come up with an early menu and train the staff, including Adkins himself.

“I was a bartender for the first two years,” Adkins says. He was 28 — and single — when Bluebird first opened. “I would start distilling at 6 [a.m.], and then I would bartend till [midnight] and then I’d sleep my office.”

Because Bluebird is committed to grain-to-glass process — meaning it generally eschews buying ready-made spirits, a relatively common practice in the craft distilling community — the only booze it had to work with in the early days was vodka and white whiskey. That meant the bar staff had to get creative, deploying infusions and house-made shrubs, tinctures, and bitters to variegate the cocktail list. Some of the drinks on the initial menu are still on there today, including the Bluebird (vodka, blueberry, mint, lime, club soda).

Whiskey dominates Bluebird’s repertoire today, but there’s also gin, vodka, agave spirits, rum, and a new line of coffee liqueurs and amaros. Per-bottle prices range from $30 for vodka to $85 for a cask-strength bourbon, but the distillery recently launched Townie, an affordably priced ($35/bottle) whiskey brand that blends Bluebird’s house-distilled whiskey with wholesale bourbon.

“Some of this stuff is what I want to create, but also it’s where we see areas in the market that need to be filled,” Adkins says of Bluebird’s approach to product development. “I’m creative — and I get bored. Whiskey is my passion, but I have a lot of other interesting ideas that I want to try out.”

Market pressures — and just a little boredom — also played a role in the decision to rework the Phoenixville tasting room. Adkins says he’s noticed consumers easing up on alcohol and growing more interested in spirit-free alternatives. “Our numbers for drink sales have gone down. The town’s numbers have gone down — you know, all of our friends’ establishments," he says. “There’s some writing on the wall here, people want other aspects than alcohol.”

Adkins decided pizza would be a good fit for Bluebird, given the overlapping use of fermentation. He took a three-day intensive course at Maryland’s Pizza University to study dough-making and Neapolitan pies, then hired Fierro “to take it to the next level,” Adkins says. He hopes to hire a pizzaiolo and full-time dough maker for the restaurant as the kitchen comes online.

“I’m not interested in making anything half-assed,” Adkins says. “If I do anything, I want it to be the best of the best.”