Kansas City area brewery will open second location in owner’s hometown, outside city limits

New breweries are often an early signal of revitalization in small towns in 21st century America, and Atchison’s been angling for one for a while now.

As far back as 2018, a brewery has been near the top of the civic wish list in surveys of residents of the Kansas town along the Missouri River, about an hour’s drive northwest of downtown Kansas City.

Soon, they’ll have one: Shawnee’s Servaes Brewing Co. announced last week that it plans to open a second location in Atchison this summer.

“I’m from Atchison, and a lot of my family still lives there — my dad is a farmer and rancher in the area,” said owner Courtney Servaes. “It was always in the back of my mind that I might try to do something there one day. A lot of the people I graduated high school with have started to move back to Atchison, so there’s this younger generation of people doing things there that I think we can be a part of.”

Servaes, who was the first female brewery owner-operator in Kansas when she opened in Shawnee in 2019, will lease from Berger Real Estate LLC a former freight house at 118. S. Second St., across the street from the river. It will have a bar (no food), an event space, and a 10-barrel brewing system (the Shawnee location is a three-barrel system).

“It’s right next to Mueller’s, which is a popular Atchison spot,” Servaes said. “It’s this big, bright, red building, right off the water. I can’t think of a better location in Atchison for what we’re doing.”

She said Servaes in Atchison will have fewer unique beers than the Shawnee location, with a focus on some flagship flavors while rotating in some seasonal options.

“We’ll probably have some beers named after things in Atchison,” she said. “When we were thinking about opening in Atchison, I started brewing a light lager that we ended up calling Amelia (after Atchison native Amelia Earhart). It seemed like the type of beer that could be popular in a small town. And it’s actually become our top seller in Shawnee. So, that’ll definitely be part of the vibe.”

Servaes said they’re aiming for a mid-July opening. She expects they’ll be open Friday through Sunday, and maybe expand to Thursdays depending on how business goes.