Auburn's Prison City Brewing opening a taproom in Lake Placid

The Adirondack village is the spot where PCB owners Dawn and Marc Schulz met. The new spot will be called Prison City ADK.

Dawn and Marc Schulz, the wife and husband team behind Auburn’s Prison City Brewing, are taking it full circle.

The couple met in 1996 while living in Lake Placid — Dawn owned a restaurant and Marc helped open Lake Placid Pub & Brewery. They brewed a stout called “Midnight Mountain Mud” on their first date. The recipe came from a Grateful Dead cookbook btw. (And no, this isn’t a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie, it’s real life.)

And in a move that’s really a homecoming, the Cayuga County brewery, one of the most lauded and awarded spots in this region, is opening a taproom in the Adirondacks. The 710-square-foot space will be located at 2577 Main St. in the village of Lake Placid. If all goes according to plan, Prison City ADK will be open later this spring.

“We always intended to go back to Lake Placid, but we never knew when it would happen,” Dawn said. “Here we are with kids, businesses, really embedded in Auburn. On a recent vacation, we saw this small space available for rent on Main Street in Lake Placid, and thought, ‘That would be the ideal spot to open a very small outpost.’”

Photo: Yes, this is a picture of a computer screen, but this is how crafty Marc Schulz sent it to me. So we might as well keep it as is. This is the exterior of Prison City’s forthcoming Lake Placid outpost.

The new space will have 8-10 beers on draft, limited seating, four packs to go, and merchandise.

On their first date, they originally planned to go to the movies. But beer won, like it has been for nearly 30 years now. But like the music they most enjoy (I promise I won’t badmouth Phish here), maintaining an improvisational outlook can often be the most rewarding.

“We were friends for a couple of years,” Dawn said.

“And she couldn’t resist me,” Marc interjected with a hearty chuckle.

“He’s weirdly charming,” I added.

“It’s the Masshole in me,” concluded Marc, a Massachusetts native and New England Patriots fan.

“We were dabbling in homebrewing and had some ingredients lying around,” Dawn said. “We’ve been dating ever since.”

Photo: This is also a photo of a computer screen sent to me by Marc. But you get the idea, the space is thoroughly Lake Placid.

They certainly didn't expect their journey would lead them back to Lake Placid after spending so many years in Dawn’s native Auburn, both raising a family and as business owners. But when they settled on this small Lake Placid location in the primest of prime spots, Dawn was shocked they were able to keep it secret for a few weeks.

Marc spent a number of years working for T.J. Sheehan Distributing and Prison City now works with Sheehan in New York.

Prison City’s move is part of a larger trend in New York (and really elsewhere). We’re seeing breweries expand their footprints, not through distribution, but through secondary and tertiary locations. It’s an ideal move, especially in New York where licensing makes it possible to operate multiple branch offices, because it allows breweries to completely control the beer they sell. There’s no middleman to appease. The margins are as high as they’ll ever be.

Photo: A pretty, painted silo at Prison City’s production facility complex on North Street in Auburn.

But it’s not that simple for Prison City. The brewery, which opened its much, much larger production facility in December 2020, is thriving in distribution right now. It recently expanded its reach into Massachusetts and already has a presence in Pennsylvania and Vermont. It’ll soon launch in Ohio, too.

This move accomplishes two things, Dawn said: 1. It’ll get them back to Lake Placid more often to see the many friends they have left in the area; 2. It’ll allow them to sell more beer. “It’s really in that order,” Dawn said.

“It gets us back to our roots,” Marc added. “We’ll be selling more of our beer at full margin and selling more of our beer at full margin in arguably one of the busiest tourist towns in the northeast, maybe the east coast.”

The Schulzes never even expected to expand beyond the original State Street brewpub with its 5-barrel brewing system. Original PCB head brewer Ben Maeso produced some of the best beers I’ve ever had from a New York state brewery there. His beers earned medals from the Great American Beer Fest. There were lines of people for his Mass Riot hazy IPA and recognition as the best IPA in America in a Paste Magazine blind taste test. (Maeso left in late 2022 and recently started working at Underground Beer Lab in East Syracuse.) The smaller system now resides in the larger production facility and is still utilized for experimental pilot batches.

As Marc pointed out, COVID really changed everything. When Prison City was constructing its production facility, the Schulzes envisioned that business would be driven by the thirsty juice wolves (I forgot who coined that moniker) waiting in line to take home cases of hazy IPAs. But the pandemic shifted everything, Marc said.

“This is just an extension of the ever-changing craft beer game,” Marc said. “We’re trying to stay ahead. Even though we’ve been talking about this for a while, it’s not a knee-jerk reaction to what a lot of our fellow New York state brewers are doing. It’s ultimately what we always thought made sense for our brewery.”

Prison City’s current brewing team is wildly talented and experienced. Head brewer Tony Cordova previously worked at War Horse and Lucky Hare. (He’s also among the sweetest people you’ll ever meet.) And innovation brewer Eric Pham is in the middle of a prestigious internship as part of the Michael James Jackson Foundation for Brewing and Distilling scholarship program. The Schulzes said they’ll soon kick the wild ale program into high gear again, too.

The excitement is palpable.

“I feel as excited about this as when we announced we were opening the production brewery in 2018,” Marc said. “And then with it being a bit of a homecoming, how could it get any better? We gave so many friends up there. Lake Placid is a special place.”

Remember that story I published just yesterday? The one where I highlighted Chemung County-based Upstate Brewing opening a new taproom in Yates County? In that one, I wrote:

It’s not hard to imagine or envision other regional breweries following this branch office model. Other Half is the obvious example. But we’ve also seen it with places like Mortalis and Frequentem. So it should be fascinating to watch which breweries pull back a bit from distribution and focus on supplying a secondary (or tertiary) taproom.

No, I’m not some sort of beer Nostradamus. But you can expect to read about more and more of these moves in future newsletters. I am very excited to share those stories and very excited to track all this movement. It’s a wild time in beer. So it makes a ton of sense to move where you’re most comfortable. And in this case, it’s a homecoming of sorts for Dawn, Marc, and Prison City.