Tired Hands Brewing turned its original Ardmore outpost into a private event space as it navigates the future

Tired Hands Brewing’s Ardmore Brewing Company brewpub has been turned into a private event space, for now, as its owner navigates the future of the beer company.

Tired Hands’ Kennett Square taproom and bottle shop is permanently closed, owner Jean Broillet confirmed to The Inquirer on Thursday. Tired Hands’ Beer Park in Newtown Square also will not reopen this summer as the property’s owners are looking to redevelop it, Broillet said.

Tired Hands’ Ardmore Fermentaria and Fishtown restaurant St. Oner’s remain open for business. The brewing company’s MT. Airy Biergarten is a seasonal operation that will reopen in the spring.

Broillet said the decision to shift to private events at the Ardmore Brewing Company location was born out of a number of factors: having two Tired Hands locations in Ardmore was confusing for customers; ongoing construction in Ardmore created a “prohibitive environment” for doing business; and the changing landscape of brewing has prompted Tired Hands to begin reimagining parts of its business model.

When Broillet opened the first Tired Hands location, the BrewCafé, in 2012, he said there was little by way of interesting, high-quality food and drink in Ardmore. At the time, he said, Tired Hands’ craft beer and artisan meats and cheeses stood in stark contrast to the Wawas and Irish pubs the area was accustomed to. Now, that era is a distant memory as Ardmore blossoms as a culinary destination on the Main Line.

Ardmore “went from zero to 60 really quickly in terms” of dining and entertainment options, said Broillet. He added that Tired Hands was a catalyst for that progress.

In 2015, Broillet and his business partner and wife Julie Foster opened the Fermentaria at 35 Cricket Terrace, just blocks from Tired Hands’ first location at 16 Ardmore Ave.

The Fermentaria was a major expansion for Tired Hands. It offered food options that extended beyond the BrewCafé‘s sandwich-and-salad-based menu, like steak frites and baby back ribs. It also quadrupled Tired Hands’ production capacity. At the BrewCafé, Tired Hands’ brewers were able to produce 1,000 barrels of beer annually. At the time of its opening, Broillet anticipated the Fermentaria would increase production to 4,000 barrels per year.

Tired Hands opened St. Oner’s, a Fishtown restaurant and brewpub, in 2020.

In the years that followed, Tired Hands opened the seasonal Biergarten in Mount Airy, the Kennett Square taproom, and the Beer Park in Newtown Square.

In 2021, Broillet stepped down from daily operations after allegations of sexism and racism at Tired Hands proliferated on social media, including claims that women were held to different standards than their male counterparts and employees were berated or publicly humiliated for mistakes. Broillet returned to his post at the helm of Tired Hands a year later.

Broillet said that “lots of valuable lessons, worldly lessons, were learned during that process” and that Tired Hands is doing everything it can to “prevent that from ever happening again.”

While opening a second Ardmore outpost helped grow Tired Hands’ footprint on the Main Line, having “two of the same company” also made things “pretty confusing for people,” Broillet said.

In efforts to iron out the confusion, Tired Hands rebranded its BrewCafé last spring, renaming it the Ardmore Brewing Company, upgrading its interior, and adding more food and cocktail options while cutting down its beer list.

“The confusion was still there,” Broillet said.

Broillet also brought on a culinary team that had extensive experience with private events. They began to host a handful of events at the brewery — retirement parties, birthdays, etc. — which were a success.

At the same time, major construction had created a “prohibitive environment for us to do business here on Ardmore Avenue,” Broillet said. Construction on the mixed-use Piazza project and Ardmore Avenue Community Center are ongoing, both of which are proximate to Ardmore Avenue and the businesses that operate there.

The brewery shifted to exclusively hosting private events in the last few months, a decision Broillet said he “couldn’t be happier” with.

The brewery owner said the Ardmore Avenue location will be open to the public again in the future, but did not specify in what form.

The taproom and bottle shop in Kennett Square will not reopen.

Broillet said he opened a Tired Hands outpost in Kennett Square, in part, to have a presence near his family members who lived there. Though it was a “fun” chapter, Broillet said it no longer made sense to operate in Kennett Square, where Tired Hands already has a strong network of distributors that can get their beers into people’s hands without making them trek to the bottle shop.

Broillet offered assurances that Ardmore Brewing Company will open up to the public again, but said the specifics aren’t clear yet. Tired Hands also plans on expanding its Mount Airy footprint with a permanent restaurant space.

For brewers across the country, the specter of people drinking less alcohol looms large. Sales of craft beer fell 4% in 2024, and there were more brewery closings than openings in late 2024 and early 2025, the first time in 20 years such a phenomenon had occurred. Brewerytown’s Crime & Punishment Brewing shuttered last April, with its owners citing a shifting culture around alcohol among the reasons for its closure. Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant, a Philly-area craft brewing pioneer, abruptly shuttered all of its locations in September.

Broillet said that while the changing dynamics of the industry remain on his mind, Tired Hands was not “acutely a victim of that downturn.” Sales had been down slightly over the past few years, but Broillet attributes that more to having two locations in Ardmore than to the state of the industry. He’s bullish about Tired Hands’ ability to distinguish itself and sees excitement in the changes.

“Those sentiments have a way of just propelling you forward,” Broillet said.

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