Foster-Powell Welcomes a Brand-New Brewery with Detroit-Style Pizza

The food and drink scene at the Foster-Powell area continues to get more exciting. Assembly Brewing opened on Saturday, March 23 serving American beers, cocktails, and Detroit-style pizza in a vast, industrial brewpub space, New School Beer first reported.

Co-owner George Johnson started as a homebrewer and an amateur pizza chef before he studied professional brewing and pizza-making — Johnson was set on opening a brewpub in his neighborhood, where he tended bar and lived for more than a decade. “It was always going to be in Foster; it’s my neighborhood,” Johnson says. “It was underrepresented completely.”

Johnson’s style refreshingly straightforward, with $5 brews like “Stout,” “IPA,” and “Amber” he wryly calls “beer-flavored beer.” Those looking for something other than beer can also find a few $6 ciders on tap, plus a modest $5-$8 cocktail menu. “We want to be accessible to the neighborhood,” Johnson explains. “We might do speciality beers down the line, but we have a backbone of classic beers.”

Johnson is also responsible for the pizza, which he learned to make in Detroit from Shawn Randazzo, the award-winning chef of Detroit Style Pizza Company. The thick, square pies come in two sizes with classic styles like meat-lovers, Hawaiian, and veggie gourmet. Sandwiches, salads, and other traditional pub grub fills out the rest of the menu.

Assembly Brewing’s co-owner Adam Dixon owns the building, which is a renovated, 7,500 square-foot space once home to a Korean grocery store. The team ripped out a drop-ceiling to expose massive wooden beams, using some of the reclaimed wood to build the bar and booth backs; the bar top itself is 100-year-old maple from railcar floors. A mural runs along one wall, a project by commissioned local artists as an homage to Diego Rivera’s famous Detroit Industry Murals, though with brewers rather than auto-industry workers.

Assembly Brewing is open daily from 11 a.m. until 2:00 a.m. All hours are currently 21+ only.

• Assembly Brewing [Official]
• First Look at Assembly Brewing, Opening in Portland’s Foster-Powell Neighborhood [New School Beer]