Photo by Chris Witzke
As Nathaniel Gravely walked through the cavernous former tile shop in Phoenix Hill — the building that opened this summer as his eponymous brewery — he knew what he didn’t want behind the bar: shelves of booze, a ladder, a couple of TVs. “The same shit you see everywhere,” the 31-year-old says. “I wanted to do something big.” Behold the Wall of Sound, a collection of tape-to-tape reels, amps, 8-track players, turntables, mixers, speakers (four working) and a bunch of other vintage music gear. “We had a kick drum but didn’t get it worked in because we ran out of space, unfortunately,” Gravely says. The original concept, created by some of Gravely’s industrial-design friends in Brooklyn, included wires that hung from a beam and “plugged in” to the tap handles. His brother-in-law and Gravely Brewing Co.’s head brewer, Cory Buenning, found all the stuff. “He was addicted to it,” Gravely says. “I think he went to every Goodwill and flea market within a 50-mile radius of here.” Using a spreadsheet, Buenning compiled measurements for every piece in the Wall of Sound; then local woodworker Chad Donegan turned sealed butcher block into custom cabinetry to fit each item. “There are a couple that don’t fit because I swapped in different equipment I liked, and it killed him because it wasn’t clean any more. But everything else is nestled in perfectly,” Gravely says. The brewery has a stage for live music, and beer names like La Bamba, Power Chord and Analog. “We like to call ourselves the world’s first music brewery,” Gravely says.
This originally appeared in the October 2017 issue of Louisville Magazine. To subscribe to Louisville Magazine, click here. To find us on newsstands, click here.
