From tiny taproom, Cold Harbor expands to brewery and restaurant in Westborough

WESTBOROUGH — For more than seven years, Cold Harbor Brewing Co. bided its time inside one of the smallest taprooms in the state.

Will Oliveira, the president and founder, watched and learned as other breweries rose and fell. He tweaked and iterated and grew the brewery about as much as possible given the restraints created by its tiny headquarters.

Oliveira remained determined to wait for the right time to expand, when he could design a plan without the help of investors. It finally began taking shape last year, with the first beam raised in September.

Ten months later Cold Harbor is set to welcome guests to its new restaurant and brewery, at 66 Otis St. The tentative grand opening date, at time of writing, was Saturday. Standing in the sunlit restaurant, I asked Oliveira about how he felt now after watching the brewery come together over these many months.

“I haven’t been able to step back and absorb it,” he told me. “Everybody keeps saying, ‘Wow, it’s amazing.’ I feel like I’ve been talking about it for so long that I just want it to be a living thing to me, rather than just an idea.”

Let me upgrade you

Everything about Cold Harbor has gotten bigger and better, such as the beer cooler that looks about the same size as its old Milk Street taproom, if not slightly larger.

I found myself stopping several times during a recent walk around the resplendent brewery, built by the Leominster firm The McCarty Companies, to take in every detail.

Oliveira greeted me at the front after I spent a second admiring the glass and stone façade, then gave me the run of the place.

Amid all the feats of engineering and construction, I marked the little splashes of community, like the two paintings paying homage to the Westboro Speedway, the racetrack once thrilled residents throughout the 1940s and into the mid-'80s in the lot across the street from the brewery.

During my tour with Oliveira, I kept thinking on a couple of past visits to Cold Harbor’s old taproom. Groups of us would try to squeeze in on busy nights, often pushing up against a sidewall or crowding around one of the few tables.

With those images in my head, the new Cold Harbor looked cavernous, with about 200 seats inside, a big bar under a coffered ceiling, and a grand events room behind sliding barn doors. More drinking and dining spots wait outside, along a long patio that starts on one end with couches set beneath a pergola.

Never again will Cold Harbor customers feel crammed in or compelled to bring their own chairs.

As he showed me around, Oliveira would introduce me to several hires he brought on to lead Cold Harbor’s restaurant, including its general manager, Nick Long.

Cold Harbor’s loyal customer base deserves this brewery, Long told me, as the ultimate thanks for sticking around. “They’ve persevered through a space that we’ve outgrown as a brand,” he said. “They’ve waited a long time for this.”

Outside of the bar area, Cold Harbor will operate like any restaurant, with a host and waitstaff. That change, which called for adding a pub brewery license, means you can expect more than just brews. The bar will able to serve wine and cocktails, too, such as a Manhattan and a Negroni.

“Not everybody drinks beer,” Oliveira said. “It breaks our heart but we understand.”

Farm fresh

Cold Harbor gets its name from Cold Harbor Brook, a tributary that wends from Rocky Pond in Boylston to the Assabet River, flowing by farmland, neighborhoods and busy roadways.

Before emptying into the Assabet, Cold Harbor Brook passes Davidian’s Farm in Northborough, one of a handful of farms Cold Harbor will source ingredients from for its menu.

“We’re excited to support our local farms and community,” Oliveira told me. “That attitude has always been the defining characteristic of Cold Harbor.”

The restaurant’s executive chef, Nate Gardner, made a point to tell me how he’ll use grass-fed beef from Town Line Dairy Farm in Upton for the burgers. Gardner, who most recently ran the kitchen at Maddi’s Cookery & TapHouse on Green Street in Worcester, said that apart from farm-fresh ingredients, he wants to incorporate Cold Harbor beer into his cooking.

“That was a fun challenge for me to figure out how to use beer in almost every facet of the menu,” he said.

A staple of the kitchen will be the thin-crust pizza made with beer dough. And Oliveira personally requested added to the menu a pie pulled from his childhood on the South Coast and family’s Portuguese heritage.

“We would always go to this place in Somerset that served this great thin crust pizza with chouriço,” he said, noting the chouriço will come from the 100-year-old Gaspar’s Sausage Co. Inc. in Dartmouth.

Brewing bigger

Spicy sausage aside, the meat of Cold Harbor’s operation still lies behind the kitchen, in the new brewhouse that not only dwarfs the brewery’s old one but also enhances it in just about every way.

Cold Harbor’s brewhouse has gone from roughly 2,300 square feet to 5,500 square feet with the move, creating space for several additional tanks that has the brewery poised to nearly double its production in its first year, from 1,500 barrels to 4,500. All told, the brewery has the capacity to brew up to 6,000 barrels, Oliveira said.

Other than upping its volume, Cold Harbor has added a few brewhouse features that improve upon the beer’s quality as well as its own brewing efficiency. There’s a carbon filter to remove the chlorine and further purify the town’s water, giving the beer a cleaner taste; a mill for processing grain; and a canning line allowing the brewery to better control its packaging schedule.

“We have everything we want in this brewery; we just need to get going,” said production manager Mike “Lashes” Gleason, covered in sweat from racing around in the heat to get the brewhouse up and running.

Cold Harbor hasn’t brewed a fresh batch in-house since the end of April, in part because of delays in opening the new brewery.

The production freeze limits the brewery, as it expects to only open with three of its own brews on tap – the IPAs “Juice Freak,” “Novacaine,” and “Feather Edge.” Friends and breweries that Cold Harbor admires will help it fill most of the other nine tap lines, Oliveira said, at least initially. Cold Harbor will start filling kegs after the first week or two.

He counts this scheduling kerfuffle among the other delays and unexpected issues that have seemed to him to arrive daily, so I understand why he hasn’t had time to relish the expansion.

But near the end of my tour, he did allow himself a brief moment to feel excited for the opening. This came while he imagined the long, cushioned banquette seats lined with kids from baseball or hockey teams, their parents keeping watch from the bar area.

He could picture the empty restaurant packed and boisterous.

Following its grand opening, Cold Harbor Brewing Co.’s 66 Otis St. restaurant and brewery will be open Sunday through Thursday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: With new restaurant, brewery, Cold Harbor flows from pond to river