Rock’n Dough started out as a food truck selling pizzas on the streets of Memphis in 2012.
More than a decade later, Rock’n Dough has grown to include five brick-and-mortar restaurants across Tennessee, including two in the Memphis area (Germantown and Cordova), plus a production brewery in Jackson, Tenn.
That brewery, Hub City Brewing Co., makes both the Rock’n Dough-branded beers, as well as Hub City craft beers that are now distributed across the state.
In Memphis, the presence of Hub City beers is growing.
A Rock’n Dough kiosk, selling pizza and Hub City-brewed beers, opened at FedEx Forum this season.
A third brick-and-mortar Rock’n Dough restaurant, complete with duckpin bowling lanes and a DJ booth, is set to open April 8 at 704 Madison Ave. in Orleans Station, near Downtown.
Meanwhile, six-packs of Hub City beers, distributed through Eagle Distributing, are starting to show up on Memphis-area store shelves, including local Kroger stores.
Among the beers that are available around Memphis — or will be later — are Hub City’s Rivalry IPA, My Town Pilsner, Strawberry Skip Day Wheat Ale, Snow Plow Vanilla Porter, Oktoberfest Marzen Lager and Hop 100 Session IPA.
“I think, especially when you move into a new market and people aren’t familiar with your brand, they just assume that you’re some big box brewery that AB (Anheuser-Busch) is trying to shove down their throats,” Cody Stooksberry, Hub City’s head brewer, told Memphis Beer Blog.
“We’re not that. There’s a dude that owns the place, and there’s me that makes the beer. That’s it. We’re a craft brewery.”
Hub City sources its ingredients, from grains to hops, locally, as much as possible. In fact, most of the Rock’n Dough beers are made with grains grown in the Cumberland Plateau.
“It’s exceptionally expensive to do that, like almost double. … (But)it’s important to us to spend the extra, because we know that’s what sets craft apart,” Stooksberry said.
Stooksberry started out a homebrewer, tinkering with brewing setups that got more sophisticated over time. He built a bar inside his garage and cranked out batch after batch of homebrew, which he would give away in growlers.
“When I brew, I put my headphones on and I just zone out, and that’s why I love it. It’s a methodical process. And then the goal of attaining the same beer every single time — it’s a fun goal,” Stooksberry shared on a recent afternoon.
After a short stint at Blue Pants Brewery in Alabama, Stooksberry came to Rock’n Dough in Jackson about eight years ago. He was the general manager but learned the art of brewing under the tutelage of brewer Ben Pugh, who would later start his own brewery, Meddlesome Brewing Co., in Cordova.
Stooksberry called Rock’n Dough’s original one-barrel setup a “glorified homebrew system.”
“I cut my teeth there. We were able to make so many batches of so many different things. I was producing six barrels a week and just constantly changing it,” he said.
“A barrel didn’t last very long, so we could do all sorts of stuff. And if it didn’t stick, you’re only pouring out a barrel, right? It was a good opportunity to just do some hardcore recipe dialing.”
Stooksberry brewed on a three-barrel system at Rock’n Dough’s Germantown location for a short time. But even with the larger setup, Rock’n Dough couldn’t keep up with the demand for beer.
About Hub City Brewing
Hub City, Jackson’s only production brewery, had an inauspicious start. After just its first year in business, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Stooksberry took to standing outside the brewery in a pint glass outfit, holding up a sign promoting Hub City’s version of a lemonade stand. Stooksberry brewed small batches of beer and sold growlers to people who pulled up in the parking lot.
Hub City survived, and last month celebrated its 5th anniversary as the brewing arm of Rock’n Dough and now full-fledged production brewery.
The brewery and taproom are located in Downtown Jackson at 250 W. Main St., in the first floor of a historic building that was once a Ford Model T showroom and, later, a grocery store.
The name Hub City is a nod to Jackson’s history as a railroad town. The brewery is just off the tracks.
Last year, Hub City Brewing produced about 2,000 barrels of beers, but the brewery will be stepping it up quite a bit in 2024 to help supply the statewide distribution and the additional Memphis Rock’n Dough location.
Stooksberry and two other brewers work in a 10-barrel brewhouse, with shiny fermentation tanks surrounding it. Hub City has ten 10-barrel fermenters; four 30-barrel fermenters, including two horizontal tanks for lagers; and four 3-barrel fermenters.
Hub City needs the space.
Between Rock’n Dough and Hub City-labeled beers, Hub City keeps 26 beers in rotation at all times, and its brewers are brewing six days a week in the back corner of the 22,000-foot space.
In the front of the building, Hub City has built a sprawling taproom that’s authentic, honoring the building’s roots.
The bar is the old conveyer belt that was used to carry groceries up to the second floor. Soda and whiskey bottles on the wall were found in a cellar that was closed up in 1944 and rediscovered when the taproom’s bowling alley was constructed.
The taproom, open Tuesdays-Sundays, also features a stage for music, games, and a nice outdoor space.
Stooksberry hopes more people from Memphis make the roughly hour trek to Jackson to visit.
“It’s worth the drive out. If you’re going to Nashville, stop in for a pint. At least poke your head in, because it’s pretty cool,” Stooksberry said. “We worked hard on this place, so I want people to be able to able to experience what we’ve done here.”
