Rose Schweikhart, right, owner of Superior Bathhouse Brewery, and Jimm Powell, brewer, load 5-gallon kegs onto their delivery truck for delivery to bars and restaurants.
HOT SPRINGS — Rose Schweikhart bears on her upper arm a tattoo of a bolt. The tattoo memorializes the burn mark from an actual bolt that was seared into her flesh as she was renovating the building that houses her microbrewery, restaurant and bar.
She calls it “my symbol of strength and pain.”
Schweikhart’s strength and pain have borne results. Last year was Superior Bathhouse Brewery’s first million-dollar year.
The craft brewery, occupying a repurposed bathhouse at 329 Central Ave. on the city’s famed Bathhouse Row, posted $1.1 million in revenue. The business — at least the bar and restaurant elements of it — opened almost exactly four years ago, on July 12, 2013. But the brewery itself didn’t come online until January 2015.
“That’s about double what I had thought my 10-year projection would be,” she said of her revenue figures. “I had to adjust quickly to growth that I didn’t expect.”
That adjustment has included in the past year the purchase of four 10-barrel brewing tanks, doubling her brewing capacity, a new truck and a keg washer, an investment totaling about $90,000. And it included a $300,000 investment for the purchase and renovation of a 10,000-SF building in downtown Hot Springs to serve as a warehouse and distribution center.
Schweikhart is also planning to spend $55,000 to buy a canning or bottling line for that new warehouse. And she recently signed a distribution deal for her beers with Little Rock’s Central/Moon Distributors, so she can “send those little ambassadors out into the world.”
“It’s been a good year,” Schweikhart said.
The craft brewing industry in Hot Springs is hot. Schweikhart will be joined later this summer by SQZBX, a pizza restaurant and microbrewery pronounced “squeezebox,” at 236 Ouachita Ave., owned by husband-wife duo Zac Smith and Cheryl Roorda. And Bubba Brew’s Brewing Co. is opening its Spa City Taproom at 528 Central Ave. by late summer or early fall.
Jonathan Martin, a Hot Springs lawyer, is a founder, brewmaster and general counsel of Bubba Brew’s of Bonnerdale (Hot Spring County), about 21 miles southwest of Hot Springs. Martin, president of the Arkansas Brewers Guild, is leaving the law practice to devote his energies full time to the brewing company, which also opened in 2015.
The taproom in downtown Hot Springs is an effort to provide additional exposure to the brewery’s products. Craft brewing “really dovetails well with the tourist and seasonal economy of Hot Springs,” Martin said.
A resurgence in high-quality, locally owned restaurants has also contributed to the momentum, he said. “People want to know where their food comes from. They want to know where their beer comes from.”
“It’s blowing up,” Steve Arrison said of the local brewpub scene. Arrison is CEO of Visit Hot Springs, the city’s convention and visitors bureau. “It’s just incredible the amount of growth we’re seeing in that, which is great,” he said.
“It fits hand in glove with what today’s travelers are looking for,” Arrison said. “You can enjoy a hike through our national park or riding a bike through one of our parks and then can stop off and enjoy something that’s made right here.”
Pioneer Brewer
Schweikhart is the pioneer. She came to Hot Springs in 2011 with her then-husband, Todd Cranson, who’d been named general director of the Hot Springs Music Festival. Schweikhart, who has a master’s degree in tuba performance, had been employed at the University of Illinois at Springfield, doing administrative work on budgets and purchasing, “businessy stuff.”
She’d entered the doctoral program in public administration — “a public administration version of a business degree,” she said, “so it has a lot of practical applications to business.”
Between her work experience and her course work it was “invaluable training,” Schweikhart said.
The couple had been making beer at home and Schweikhart learned about Hot Springs’ thermal waters. She’d also learned that there wasn’t a brewery in Hot Springs. Using Hot Springs’ magic waters to craft beer struck Schweikhart as a plan.
The National Park Service told her that to gain access to the waters, she’d have to be located in the park. Under what Schweikhart called the Park Service’s “innovative” leasing program, she basically privatized a historic asset: the Superior Bathhouse, which had been vacant since 1983.
In 2003-04, the Park Service had spent about $1.5 million on “basic stabilization” of the 11,000-SF building, constructed in 1916, performing lead and asbestos abatement, installing a fire suppression and HVAC system, Schweikhart said, “so that someone like me could have a chance.”
Although she has spent $600,000 on renovating the building, without the Park Service’s big-dollar investment, “it would have been very difficult to come up with that extra million-and-a-half, she said. “It made the numbers possible as a startup.”
Schweikhart worked with the Arkansas Small Business & Technology Development Center at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia to develop her business plan, but her initial approaches to local banks for funding were rejected.
She decided to revise the microbrewery plan to implement it in phases, recognizing that “Hot Springs has never seen something like this.”
Schweikhart took the new plan to Southern Bancorp of Arkadelphia, which, impressed, lent her enough money to get the doors open.
“Southern Bancorp is my hero bank,” she said. Schweikhart also praised the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, which, through its tourism development loan program, bought half of her bank loan from Southern Bancorp. “It helps everybody feel more confident in the project.”
Since then, she’s been able to reinvest profits into continued growth, and with a track record and hard numbers to show lenders, Schweikhart has been able to borrow additional money to continue her expansion. Arvest Bank gave her a loan so she could finish out the second floor of Superior Bathhouse as a party and event space.
Superior Bathhouse Brewery brewed 15,500 gallons of beer in 2016, and Schweikhart, with her new brewing tanks and that distribution agreement in hand, expects to brew about 27,900 gallons this year, an 80 percent increase.
SQZBX Pizza and Beer
Zac Smith and his wife, Cheryl Roorda, are musicians who met in Seattle. After Cheryl became pregnant with their first child, Eureka, a daughter who’s now 13, the couple moved to Hot Springs in 2003 because they didn’t want to raise a child in the city.
Like Schweikhart, Smith plays the tuba; Roorda plays the accordion. They spent the first few years of their marriage touring the United States in a recreational vehicle and playing on street corners, but they came to realize that their acoustic musical act played best in the intimate, quieter ambience of restaurants.
They’d visited Hot Springs in their traveling days, had met some interesting people and “it just sort of stuck in our brains as an interesting place,” Smith said.
Once in the city, they serendipitously met several people whose influence on the couple echoes today.
Among them was Joe Davis, who had a piano tuning and repair business on Ouachita Avenue. “He charmed us with a piano piece, and Cheryl fell in love with a little Wurlitzer piano he had in there,” Smith said. The couple bought the building from Davis — along with its contents, including that Wurlitzer — seven years ago, and it’s where their pizza place and microbrewery SQZBX will be located.
Another helpful Hot Springs businessman was John Linehan, who then owned the Hot Springs Brau Haus restaurant. Smith and Roorda played at the Brau Haus (now Steinhaus Keller) through a variety of owners for almost 14 years.
Smith and Roorda have themselves done almost all of the repair and renovation work at the building at 236 Ouachita, though, Smith said, they were “extremely naïve about the level of disrepair that the building was in and the amount of effort and work it would take to get it up to snuff.”
They were able to pay off the building, built around 1920, at 236 Ouachita pretty quickly.
During this time, Smith, who had long been interested in noncommercial community radio, became involved in the effort to launch KUHS 97.9-FM, a low-power radio station, an effort that was led by Low Key Arts, a nonprofit co-founded by Bill Solleder and Shea Childs — whom Smith and Roorda had met back when they’d first arrived in Hot Springs.
Low Key Arts obtained the license from the Federal Communications Commission in 2014, and the station began broadcasting in August 2015 — in the building owned by Smith and his wife and with Smith as general manager.
By this time, Smith and Roorda’s vision for their future had coalesced into one that included the radio station (believed to be the only solar-powered radio station in Arkansas) on one side of their building and a pizza restaurant and a microbrewery on the other side.
Smith and Roorda have invested about $650,000 in the venture and have received help in the form of historic tax credits. A few investors, including Smith’s parents, have provided some funding for the couple’s venture, but Simmons Bank of Pine Bluff came through with a sizable loan, Smith said.
In addition, Six Bridges Capital Corp. of Little Rock underwrote a Small Business Administration loan, Smith said.
The couple, who added son Zephyr 12 years ago, have made a life for themselves in Hot Springs. “We love Hot Springs,” Smith said. “It has been so good to us. … To own real estate as a self-employed musician? Try and do that anywhere [else] in America.”
He added: “That’s a wonderful feeling, to feel like we’re in a place where people are rooting for us. They really want us to succeed.”
Schweikhart, of Superior Bathhouse Brewery, wants to bring people to Hot Springs. “This is definitely a destination brewery, the only brewery in a U.S. national park, in a historic bathhouse,” she said. “I’m the only brewery in the world brewing with thermal spring water. That makes us very, very unique.”
And Schweikhart thinks Hot Springs could support a couple more breweries, “as long as they’re good ones. I have great faith in Zac and Cheryl. They’re dear friends of mine. They make really good home brew, so I think they’ll put out a great product.”
Sign up for Daily E-news
