Direct flight to heaven at Straight to Ale
Good people, great beer, yummy food, it all adds up to a fantastic community.
When Bruce Weddendorf took to Facebook to offer furloughed US federal employees and their families 50% off, I wasn’t surprised. This is what a business does when its owners care about their community at least as much as their bottom line.
Without a strong community, you ain’t got a good reason to have a business. Even if what you’re selling is great beer and happy food.
So what, you ask? So everything.
I have been a regular customer at Straight to Ale since 2021. I don’t think I’ve ever spent time in Huntsville, Alabama, without spending time at the brewery. There are a few dozen indie breweries in Huntsville. I always go to that one because the beer is, indeed, excellent. And you can have it in a variety of formats — from the wee taster to the small bucket. I have a great deal of fondness for their Belgian dubbel Brother Joseph’s. They always have something new to try, too, and believe me when I say I have a made use of the wee taster size to try just about everything I could. The only one I remember actively disliking was the dill pickle beer. Not for me.
I sat down recently with Bruce Weddendorf, co-founder of Straight to Ale, to get the story behind the iconic brewery located in an old high school thoughtfully repurposed, Campus 805.
Like a lot of people in Huntsville who enjoy beer, Weddendorf is a mechanical engineer. He moved to the Rocket City after graduating from the University of South Carolina to work at NASA.
The beauty of the place first grabbed him. He swears he’ll never forget the view of Lake Guntersville on that first drive into Huntsville from South Carolina, coming down Highway 431. “Oh my God,” he said to himself, “this is the most incredible place I’ve ever seen.” And sure enough, to this day you’ll find many a photo of Lake Guntersville on his Facebook profile.
There are other things he loves about the place, but none more than the people. “I had incredible experiences with human beings here that run this place. My boss at NASA was incredibly gracious and just awesome. And that’s the kind of people who’ve made me fall in love with Huntsville.”
Weddendorf’s career at NASA was fantastic, he says, for developing his skills as a creative engineer. And if you’re ever fortunate enough to swing by his brewery, pay attention to the details, from how the floor from the old gym was used to build tables to little things like rocket stuff (I am so not an aerospace engineer) hanging from the ceiling.
Weddendorf can — and will, if you let him — talk for hours about all the great work and innovations that came out of Huntsville, from the Saturn V rocket that everyone knows to the first American satellite which many people don’t know. But what has him thoroughly enthused these days is the business he started with a group of friends including co-founder and president Dan Perry as well as his wife Jo.
As a bon vivant, he thought Huntsville in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a touch on the sleepy side. Road trips to Nashville, Atlanta or Birmingham were common when they were after a good time. But then they decided to contribute to changing the culture of their town to give everyone something fun to do after work. They brewed beer. Great beer.
Laws at the time weren’t especially friendly to craft brewers, and a group called Free the Hops was formed to advocate for reform. Eventually they got their way and brewers were allowed to brew beer with more than 5% alcohol by volume and to sell it in a variety of containers. Creativity did the rest. The beer scene in Huntsville boomed. Recent reports show it might be slowing down a little bit, but I have faith it will rebound. Engineers are way too stubborn to fail.
Beer for a great community
There are so many cool parts of the story behind Straight to Ale, from growing pains to great leadership from Downtown Huntsville and Mayor Tommy Battle to the talented architects who understood how to turn this old high school into an incredibly cool microbrewery to all the friends who helped with advice, investment money and whatever other resources were needed.
I could write a short book just on that one brewery. But the real reason I wanted to tell you about it is the role it plays in the community. Last time I was there, in early October, they were helping organize a bike tour of the city. The visit before that, in June, the brewery was totally open to people attending the first No Kings rally in the adjacent park. We could use the restroom or hide on the covered patio when it rained or got too hot — or, as is often the case in Alabama at that time of year, both.
“We would never say no,” Weddendorf says when explaining who’s allowed to come to the brewery to host an event for charity or other community goal. “We’re all about being part of the community and the whole reason we started the business was to make Huntsville more fun, so that we definitely played into our core value of, ‘How do you have a good time? How do you get people to get off the sofa, come out, hang out with their friends?’ So we had a lot of really great events, and we learned a lot of things from those events as well,” he adds.
These days, everyone is feeling the pinch from the government shutdown. But instead of retreating into its shell, Straight to Ale is being its luminous self and finding ways to help those who are hurting by welcoming them in with a heavily discounted meal.
Straight to Ale was started with a vision to make great beer and contribute to Huntsville being a fun place to be after work. “And I think what it does is, when you have a vision like that, and you can articulate the vision, you will get followers, you will get helpers. We have built a community around this idea.”
Good people, good beer, good food — it all adds up to one “ale” of a community.