Joe Walters has the art of brewing beer down to a science.
The longtime brewer has spent years distilling and fermenting locally made craft beers. He was a founding partner that helped build Liberty Street Brewing Company from the ground up in Plymouth. He and his former partner spent 13 years making it a popular microbrewery.
Now Walters is blazing his own trail. Beer guzzlers in Livonia will soon have a new place to enjoy the brewmaster’s creations. His 1 For All Brewery is expected to open this summer at 38083 Ann Arbor Road as the newest addition to the Ann Arbor Crossroads Plaza.
“Basically that’s just a play on it’s me, one person, doing everything. And that’s also my way of saying there’s a beer for everyone,” Walters said of the 1 For All name. “So if you’ve not had a craft beer you enjoyed before, I’m sure I can give you one.”
Walters is still renovating the space as he works to get the required permits and licenses from city and state officials. He hopes to open his doors in late July or by the end of August at worst.
1 For All will be a nanobrewery operating out of a 1,200 square-foot suite in the shopping center — a nanobrewery is a brewpub smaller than a microbrewery. It will feature a 25-seat tasting room, a cold room where the brews are chilled for hours and a brewery in the back of the building where they’re made.
The beer parlor won’t have a food license, so on-site viddles will be limited to popcorn in a machine. But suds sippers are welcome to bring in food from outside establishments and eat in the tasting room.
Walters plans to be a one-man operation using a single-barrel electric brewing system. That’s courtesy of an arsenal of Spike Brewing Equipment machines that have steam condensers and produce no flames, eliminating the need for exhaust hoods or supply air. The scaled-down operation cuts back on production costs and overhead, Walters indicated in plans submitted to city officials.
“So this is me doing a solo project all by myself,” he explained to What Now Detroit. “The concept is small. I’ll be making the beer and I’ll be selling the beer. It’s a very simple type of thing.”
Beer and hard seltzer will be the obvious mainstays at 1 For All to get started. Walters says he may add wine to the menu at some point in the future.
The nanobrewery will open its doors four days a week — Wednesday through Saturday — with hours possibly expanded to Sundays during football season.
All beers made on-site will undergo a meticulous eight-hour brewing process followed by two weeks of fermentation and another 24 hours in the cold room to become carbonated. Afterward, the beer will be served directly from the fermenter through a faucet in the wall of the cold room.
Customers can imbibe in the seated bar area or order beer to go in 64-ounce glass or plastic growlers.
Walters returns to Michigan’s robust craft beer market, which includes nearly 400 international breweries and neighborhood pubs.
He plans to offer a host of traditional styles like IPA, porter, stout, amber ale, blonde lager and gluten-free beers along with German-styled Vienna and Helles lagers. According to Hometown Life, fan-favorites like a nonalcoholic root beer and Walters’ signature honey porter, Pooh Beer, will also be on the menu.
Walters is far from a newcomer to the trade. The seasoned beer artisan notched decades of production and packaging for statewide distributions while head brewer at Liberty Street Brewing Company. He opened the downtown Plymouth brewery and small winery in 2008 and was a driving force there until his business partner retired and they sold the company in 2021.
“This is something I’ve wanted to do pretty much the last 10 years,” Walters said. “After a few years with the original brewery, I pretty soon realized that this would work better if I was by myself. So it feels great to be doing this on my own. I’m kind of up there in age so this is a semi-retirement plan for me.”
Walters has served as a consultant, helping to design several breweries in the area. He was also an instructor at Schoolcraft College in Livonia, where he taught classes in the brewing and distillation technologies program.
He still has a lot of regular customers who enjoy his beer.
“My hopes is that by returning to Livonia, maybe some of them can come back in and have one of their favorites,” he said.
