CARROLL - The Fairfield County area will soon have another brewery, as Outerbelt Brewing at 3560 Dolson Court will host its grand opening from noon to 11 p.m. Saturday.

Dan Griffin is the head brewer and Robert Landis and Davey Landis are two of the owners.

The new business sits in a 25,000 square-foot building that used to house Lowes, and dates back to the late 1970s.

Outerbelt uses 12,000 square feet, with the tap room comprising 5,500 square feet. There is also a 1,000 square-foot private event room that should be ready by mid-summer. That leaves about 4,500 square feet for the brewery.

Outerbelt Brewing is considered a production brewery in that it will also sell kegs and cans to bars and other outlets. There will be 12 employees to start.

"Robert and Davey are from Baltimore and I'm from Reynoldsburg," Griffin said. "We met through a mutual acquaintance. They bought the building originally for a different purpose, but it fit our vision for what we wanted to put here as a brewery. So we rearranged things to put a brewery here."

There are 180 tables in the tap room, but the tap room has a capacity of 300. The building also features a 1,000 square-foot outdoor patio and Griffin said an outdoor beer garden may be forthcoming.

Griffin learned his trade at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, where he earned a master's degree. He then worked at Long Trail Brewing in Vermont before moving on to Gordon Biersch in Columbus.

"But in the background while I was working, in my free time I was putting a business plan together for if the opportunity arose to start my own brewery I'd have the plan semi-ready," Griffin said. "So for me it's been a long time, five or so years, working on that. I met the Landis brothers in July 2017, and that's when we started putting ideas on paper and moving forward with that stuff."

Visitors can choose between 10 brews on Saturday. After that, there will be eight to 15 different brews to choose from. Food trucks will occasionally be on site and Griffin said TVs will be installed later. For now, though, he said the focus is getting ready for Saturday's grand opening.

"It's a big party," tap room manager Valerie Luciano said of Saturday. "We finally made it."

She said the opening was a long time in coming.

"We're excited to share our beer and our passion with the community," Luciano said.

Griffin agreed.

"The support from the community has been wonderful so far," he said. "We're excited to do stuff with the community, too. We definitely want to be community driven with reaching out to charitable organizations and hosting events or doing what's relevant for the local area."

There are other breweries nearby, including those in Pickerington, Canal Winchester and Lancaster. But Griffin said there is enough business for all of them to thrive.

"I think this area can support at least this, if not more," he said. "It's kind of been an area that has been a little bit starved for craft beers. We did the research and from living in the area for a while, I think we all feel pretty confident that there's definitely enough market share to go around to all these breweries."

Outerbelt Brewing will be open from 3 to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, noon to 11 p.m. Friday and noon to 8 p.m. Sunday.

The company website is www.outerbeltbrewing.com.

jbarron@gannett.com

740-681-4340

Twitter: @JeffDBarron