Fifth Frame Brewing opens Irondequoit taproom

Rochester brewery is shifting focus to a new taproom/restaurant in Irondequoit's Summerville neighborhood

Fifth Frame Brewing, the Rochester brewery with roots in the city, will open its new Irondequoit taproom and restaurant at 4 p.m. Friday. And when you walk in, especially if you’re familiar with the previous tenant, you’re gonna be blown away.

The brewery, which started in October 2017, temporarily closed its downtown Rochester taproom in June to focus on renovation and construction at 5370 St. Paul Blvd. in Irondequoit’s Summerville neighborhood.

The building, which sits in view of Charlotte, Lake Ontario, and the Genesee River, was last home to the Summerville Grill. It closed in 2022 after 21 years in business. The property has been part of the neighborhood fabric for generations. At its core, it has always been a community gathering place.

“This place has been an institution for decades. From bar, saloon, restaurant, hotel, it has been an institution for over a 100 years,” brewery founder Jon Mervine said. “I found articles in the attic from the 1880s. It’s picturesque. It’s tucked away. It’s honestly a hidden gem. And honestly, I can see why people like to keep it a secret.”

Photo: Fifth Frame founder Jon Mervine outside the brewery’s new Summervile spot.

He continued, “It feels pretty good. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Summerville is a magical place. The embrace the community has given us thus far has been beyond anything you could ever imagine. Just during the buildout for the past few months, just being outside doing arts and crafts, it has allowed us to get to know people and for people to get to know us. Cripes, I haven’t even served them a drink yet, but I know what their orders are. So it’s pretty fantastic.”

While modernizing the 2,357-square-foot property significantly, the new Fifth Frame hasn’t lost any of the charm of the original. The new spot has been softly opened over the past week and during that time, it has been filled with eager neighborhood residents. When I was there on Monday afternoon, the bar was full and people were trickling in for lunch. In just the few minutes I was chatting with Mervine, two drivers stopped their cars in the middle of St. Paul and shouted about how excited they were for the spot to be open.

Mervine declined to get into specifics on the future of the brewery’s downtown Rochester tasting room (located at 155 St. Paul St.) Instead, he wanted to focus on the new project, finishing up the final few details before opening, and touch on the reasons he’s excited for this new chapter.

“With downtown, things have shifted since the pandemic,” Mervine offered.

Summerville features a full-service bar and restaurant. So it’ll offer cocktails, wines, and spirits, along with a menu focused on high-end burgers and wings. He’s especially excited about the peanut butter and jelly wings using the brewery’s Draped in Jam imperial brown ale series as a base. Mervine said Fifth Frame is getting the beef from a local farm that also utilizes its spent grains from the brewing process as feed for his cows.

Parking was long a concern for patrons at the downtown spot. (Though, it was super easy to find a spot, especially if you were willing to walk a block or two.) That’s not an issue in Summerville, where the brewery has a 20-spot parking lot, street parking, and ancillary parking 100 yards away at the fishing access parking lot on the river.

“Everything people wanted from downtown, we have it here and more,” Mervine said. “The patio situation, I think there was a safety mindset that was often brought up. The patio here, we’re able to have 20 seats to start and standing room. We’ll grow that out at the season goes.

“Don’t judge the flowers. What can 100 bucks buy you that deer won’t eat? I call them Irondequoit dogs. Up here, the people are great. I think it’s the three Ps — patio, parking, people. If there is one thing about Summerville, it’s a tight-knit community.”

The property owner and Fifth Frame are already under contract, according to the application filed with the town of Irondequoit. The lease is for 10 years. Fifth Frame has an option to buy the property, which it has already done, according to a post on social media.

Mervine, the former co-founder/head brewer at the now shuttered Roc Brewing Co., opened Fifth Frame’s St. Paul Street tasting room in October 2017. Mervine left Roc in 2014. Fifth Frame has always produced its beer off-site on a 10-barrel brewing system at a nearby warehouse on Joseph Avenue. It then began serving its own beers about two months later.

Initially, the brewery combined coffee roasting and beer. Recently, it only focused on beer and food.

Fifth Frame has garnered a strong regional reputation for its rotating series of hazy IPAs, decadently over-the-top fruited sours, and true-to-style lagers poured by the foaming mug from its Lukr side-pull faucets. Many of its beers are available locally at bottle shops like One Stop Brew Shop, as well as local Wegmans stores.

While at the new spot, I enjoyed a side-pull pour of a premium American lager, perfect for the late summer sunshine, and a new version of its Lucerna, a heartier Czech pale lager aged in white wine barrels. (I’ve been told there is also a forthcoming red wine version, too.)

As Mervine saw it, he always wanted Fifth Frame to “be something more.” He envisioned seeking new outlets or different ways to attract more customers.

“Business changes, the landscape shifts, and it’s just keep up with the times. Brewery models are evolving and morphing as time goes on too. It’s always been an ambition to do something more,” Mervine said. “And being up here in Summerville, it has just given us the chance to do things at a whole different level than what we do downtown.”

It’s weird and surreal to consider I’ve been interviewing Mervine for well over a decade now. Over the last 15 years, he’s seen the ebbs and flows of the local beer scene. So I asked him what sort of perspective that offers.

“The beer landscape has changed so significantly since back in the day — it’s had several different iterations. Keeping up with the times is really important. But having loyalty and respect from the community and them appreciating your product, it’s a total 360. Just because you make good beer, it doesn’t mean people know about you. But you’ve got to have relationships with people to evangelize and spread the word. It’s a loaded question.”

A final note: It’s pretty wild to think I’ve been working on this independent publication for over two years now. In that time, I’ve published 200 newsletters, highlighted some of my favorite people in the industry, curated two beers festivals (that featured 150 participants and 4,600 attendees), and continued to break all the biggest news in the region (closures, consolidations, openings, etc.).

The Cleveland Prost remains the preeminent source for regional beer news. If you own a brewery, bar, or beer-adjacent business, this is the best place to reach the nerds you wanna be in front of. So I remain open to sponsorships, advertisements, and sponsored content. Feel free to reach out to me at clevelandprost@gmail.com for more. And more than anything, thanks for all the support. None of this would be possible without the devoted (and thirsty) audience.