If you live anywhere near the east side of Cincinnati, you have probably heard someone describe Streetside as the neighborhood brewery on Eastern Avenue, the one with the garage doors and the rail where you can look down at the brewhouse while you drink. That picture is basically accurate, and it started with a family that lived less than a mile away deciding to put a new building on a corner that already meant something to the neighborhood.
The concrete bar on a busy day, Streetside glassware on the rail, and the garage door open to the patio. Photo: Streetside Brewery.
The corner, the café, and the fire
Before anyone poured a pint under the Streetside sign, the address was tied to a different kind of night out. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported in 2015 and again at opening in 2016 that the lot at 4003 Eastern Ave., at McCullough Street, had held the East End Café, a live music bar that traced back to 1887 and lasted until a 2010 fire left the building heavily damaged. Kathie Hickey told the paper the old structure could not be saved, so the family tore it down and planned new construction, with a brick front meant to echo what had been there before.
Columbia Tusculum is the kind of place where people notice when you erase a landmark, and they notice when you try to nod to what came first. Streetside’s own taproom page picks up the same history, calling the East End Café among the city’s oldest continuously operated live music bars until the fire closed it for good, and framing the brewery as an attempt to bring fresh life to the corner for both the East End and Columbia Tusculum sides of the neighborhood.
Two years of planning, then doors open
By October 2016, the Enquirer described a finished 5,000-square-foot building with a 2,000-square-foot taproom, seating for about sixty-eight inside and roughly twenty-five outside, and a fifteen-barrel system sized for roughly 3,000 barrels a year of capacity while the family expected closer to eight hundred barrels in year one. A rail lets the taproom overlook the brewery floor below, which matches the “loft over the brewery” feeling a later visitor would write about. Kathie Hickey called the look “comfy industrial,” with a concrete bar, reclaimed redwood tables, televisions, and garage doors opening to the outside, language that still helps you picture what they were going for on day one.
Brian and Kathie Hickey and their son Garrett had been planning the project for more than two years by then, according to the same reporting. Garrett Hickey was identified as Streetside’s managing brewer at opening, with experience at several breweries including Rivertown Brewing Co. Luke Shropshire was named lead brewer, previously with Mt. Carmel Brewing Co., and he told the Enquirer that the team wanted to “push the envelope” in a crowded market and “cycle through some stuff that isn’t really done here in Cincinnati.” The Ohio Craft Brewers Association’s brewery listing now lists Garrett Hickey as head brewer, which reads as an update to the opening-week titles the Enquirer printed in 2016.
Stacked kegs carry the Streetside name, with fermenters and warehouse gear in the background. Photo: Streetside Brewery.
Opening beers and an early trophy
The first tap list was already ambitious. Streetside launched with six house beers, among them an English-style pale ale with apricot, an imperial porter, a pale ale, an IPA, a green tea honey blond ale, and a Berliner Weisse with raspberry. The raspberry Berliner Weisse had just won “King of Ohio,” or overall Best of Show, at the September 2016 Ohio Craft Brew Festival in Columbus, weeks before the taproom opened, according to Cincinnati.com. That is a useful snapshot of the personality they brought in the door, fruit and acid sitting next to more straightforward pale and IPA options.
Distribution started modestly, with some kegs heading to nearby bars and restaurants and the promise of a wider network as production grew. A food concept was still in development at that moment, which is one of those details that reminds you how young the operation was when the reporters showed up.
What the family says happened next
Streetside’s “Our Story” page, written in the family’s voice, describes the original goal in plain terms, which was to open a small neighborhood taproom and make decent beer. The same page says Brian brought manufacturing and sales experience, Kathie brought daily operations and front-of-house leadership along with community work including experience as a founding TSF board member and volunteer, and Garrett developed a brewing résumé the site describes in travel-heavy terms. The essay admits they did not predict awards, packaging lines, or a distribution footprint across Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, and it names Raspberry Beret and Demogorgon as early experiments that grew into repeat fan favorites and repeat competition winners in the years that followed. I am leaning on that page for the family’s own summary of how they experienced the growth curve, while the 2016 Enquirer piece anchors the specific opening-week lineup and the Berliner Weisse win.
The same “Our Story” page mentions practical upgrades visitors can feel directly, including a full outdoor bar on the patio, which reads as the kind of investment you make when weekends start to fill up and people want to linger outside without losing access to the full list.
The taproom as they describe it today
On the current taproom page, Streetside says it aims to balance “the precision of an ultra-modern taproom and the charm of your old corner bar,” and it puts a number on the draft system at about twenty-four taps spanning house beer, guest beer, and wine. The copy still grounds the building in the East End Café timeline, the 2010 fire, and pride in reviving the Eastern and McCullough corner.
House rules on that page are specific enough that you should skim them before you visit. Dogs may join you on the patio if they stay leashed and you clean up after them, and children need to stay seated with an adult because the room doubles as a working brewery. The taproom copy treats the building and the patio as smoke- and vape-free zones and sends smokers to a single ashtray at the northwest corner of the building, and outside food is off the table whenever a food truck or guest truck is running, so ask the bar if you are unsure.
Absolute Beer’s brewery listing, which mirrors much of Streetside’s own taproom copy, adds that the Street Chef Brigade truck parks outside for lunch, dinner, and late-night food. That lines up with what a 2019 neighborhood write-up said about stepping out of the taproom to order from the truck when hunger hits.
The long tap lineup and back bar, with Streetside glassware and coasters in the foreground. Photo: Streetside Brewery.
Columbia Tusculum in a paragraph
Streetside’s taproom page also sketches Columbia Tusculum as Cincinnati’s oldest neighborhood, older than the incorporated city, with river views, painted Victorian houses, and a mix of long-running institutions and newer dining and nightlife. Read it as scene-setting from the brewery rather than a full neighborhood history, and it still hints at why a family that already lived nearby might care about the address instead of treating it like a generic pad site.
Voices from outside the building
Yelp listed Streetside at 4.3 stars from 167 reviews as of April 2026, and with that many scores on the board the average starts to say something even when nobody attached a long story to the stars.
For longer-form reactions, The Little Things Journal wrote in 2019 that Streetside stood out among local breweries because the authors had liked every beer they tried there, and they praised the wide range of styles. They described the taproom as a loft-like space above the brewery where you can “chill with your friends and catch up, play game and of course drink great beer.” The same post calls out the Street Chef Brigade truck for burgers and an “Insane Pastrami” sandwich their son Max enjoyed, plus snacks such as Hen of the Woods chips and Tuba Pretzels, and it admits they drive about twenty minutes because the place feels worth the trip.
John’s Beer Blog offered a different angle in 2020 by focusing on a single packaged release, Streetside’s take on the nationwide Black is Beautiful imperial stout collaboration. The reviewer walked through macadamia and coconut coffee additions, a ten percent ABV, and proceeds benefiting Riverview East Academy per local news the blogger cited, then described a nose full of coffee, coconut, macadamia, marshmallow, vanilla, dark chocolate, and stone fruit, with a sweeter pastry-like palate of caramel, toffee, raisin, and milk sugar. They scored it 8.0 out of 10, admitted they usually reach for drier stouts, and still told readers to grab the beer when they see it on a shelf.
The Little Things Journal piece makes the breadth of the tap list explicit, while John’s Beer Blog shows how much detail shows up in a single Streetside can when a reviewer slows down with a snifter. The Yelp average is a separate kind of signal, a rough check that a few hundred visitors left happy enough to tap a star rating without writing an essay.
Ephemera, billed on the label as a watermelon, dragonfruit, and lime sour, shows how loud the can art can get next to a pint on the bar. Photo: Streetside Brewery.
Patio, service, and the small stuff you actually Google
The Ohio Craft Brewers Association lists the brewery at the same Eastern Avenue address with phone number 513-615-5877 and hours as of spring 2026 of Monday 3:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday 11:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., Friday 11:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., Saturday 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., and Sunday 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Yelp showed the same street address with slightly different copy on hours, which is a good reminder to glance at the official site or call before you make a tight plan around a late Sunday pint.
Amenities worth packing for include patience on parking when the weather turns nice, because a popular patio and food truck line can stress a small urban lot the same way they do at every other busy neighborhood taproom.
Bottom line
Streetside is easy to describe in a sentence because the story hangs together. A Columbia Tusculum family rebuilt a fire-scarred music bar corner into a fifteen-barrel brewery with a taproom that looks down on the tanks, then kept pushing beer styles that stood out even when Cincinnati’s craft scene was already crowded. The early Enquirer reporting still carries the concrete specs and the opening-week energy, the family’s own “Our Story” page carries the decade-later perspective, and visitor write-ups fill in how it feels to drink through the list or chase a standout can release. If you have not been yet, order something that scares you a little, grab food from the truck when it is parked, and take the patio shift when the weather cooperates, since the family has said they added a full outdoor bar out there for exactly those busy weekends.
Sources
Steigerwald, Shauna. "Streetside Brewery in works for Columbia Tusculum." The Cincinnati Enquirer. October 27, 2015. https://www.cincinnati.com/story/entertainment/nightlife/bars-and-clubs/2015/10/27/streetside-brewery-works-columbia-tusculum/74626462/ (Accessed April 12, 2026).
Steigerwald, Shauna. "Streetside Brewery opening in Columbia Tusculum." The Cincinnati Enquirer. October 5, 2016. https://www.cincinnati.com/story/entertainment/2016/10/05/streetside-brewery-opening-columbia-tusculum/90513690/ (Accessed April 12, 2026).
OUR STORY. Streetside Brewery. https://www.streetsidebrewery.com/about/our-story (Accessed April 12, 2026).
OUR TAPROOM. Streetside Brewery. https://www.streetsidebrewery.com/taproom (Accessed April 12, 2026).
Streetside Brewery. Ohio Craft Brewers Association. https://ohiocraftbeer.org/breweries/streetside-brewery/ (Accessed April 12, 2026).
"Streetside Brewery & Street Chef Brigade." The Little Things Journal. December 4, 2019. https://thelittlethingsjournal.com/2019/12/04/streetside-brewery-street-chef-brigade/ (Accessed April 12, 2026).
John’s Beer Blog. "7/10/20: Streetside Brewery’s Black is Beautiful." July 10, 2020. http://www.johnlikesbeer.com/2020/07/71020-streetside-brewerys-black-is.html (Accessed April 12, 2026).
Streetside Brewery. Absolute Beer. https://absolutebeer.com/breweries/streetside-brewery/ (Accessed April 12, 2026).
Streetside Brewery. Yelp. https://www.yelp.com/biz/streetside-brewery-cincinnati (Accessed April 12, 2026).