Among local breweries, Painted Lady Bed & Brew is far from the biggest, but it might be the most unique among the collective.

After all, who else has events like Scary Movie Bingo and beers named after lines in horror films? It’s a theme derived from the haunted history of the former brothel turned boutique hotel and event space.

We caught up with owner/brewer/plumber/janitor/renaissance man Jesse Herron during a rare free hour last week to learn how far Painted Lady has come in the last year and where he is aiming to take it in 2026.

As with all of our stories in the Look Back/Look Ahead Series, whether the interviews are in-person or over email, the three main questions remain the same. We always start by asking what was the biggest challenge the brewery had to overcome last year.

“I mean, that is a very good question,” Herron said. “It always comes down to getting our beer on tap, and I try to have three to four of our own beers on tap at at all times. And, it gets tricky when I’m the brewer, the owner, the janitor, the plumber, like wearing all these hats, it’s just tough to find time for brewing.

“So that was probably the biggest challenge. Like, when is this human cloning thing gonna happen? Because, I just keep picturing Michael Keaton in Multiplicity, and even if I’m the the dumber version of me, it’s still something, you know?”

Oh, a Multiplicity reference, that probably makes us all old, but whatever. We can see that inspire a beer name some day, but back to the present. Our second question is what was the biggest accomplishment of the past year.

“We did a ton of events,” Herron said. “I counted it up, we had about a 111 events in 2025, including about 10 weddings. That was a lot. That was more than I thought we’d done, but they were all pretty well attended. You know, I think a lot of breweries try to do a lot of events because they want to try to get people in the door and it works. And then, you get phone calls like, ‘Oh, it’s Friday night and what’s the event?’ ‘None, but we’re open for beer, come over, because we’re a brewery, and we’re open,’ they’re like, ‘Oh, OK.’ So we’re kind of reliant on events.”

That does become a bit of a double-edged sword, as quite a few other breweries have learned over the years. Just having good beer, even in a spooky setting, is not always enough to keep people besides overnight guests rolling on by.

“So it’s kind of like, well shoot, we kind of shot ourselves in the foot a little bit, but when we do the events like we have an event tonight with Cody (Polston), so that’ll bring hopefully 20 or 30 people in the door and they’ll have a beer and you know, it’s a fun time,” Herron said. “So yeah, I’m real proud of our events and all the stuff we’ve done.

“And Scary Movie Bingo is still the most popular one. We created that out of nothing, basically. And, it’s been really fun and well received, and we get new people in here every time, plus we have regulars, which is super cool to see our regulars come, you know?”

That event with Polston was this past weekend, but fear not, we are quite certain that the local author/historian/paranormal expert will be back more than once this year.

While the events are clicking, keeping the in-house beer flowing has proven to be a challenge, one that Herron said he hopes to overcome this year. Yeah, he basically answered our third question about what is the primary goal for his brewery in 2026.

“Well, we’re going to be brewing more, for sure,” Herron said. “We actually bought the walk-in cooler from Southwest Grape and Grain before they moved. We had Donovan (Lane), who’s turned to handyman stuff and working with a buddy of his doing some construction. (They) cut a hole or a door in the wall of the brewery, which is adobe, going out to the outside where we’re going to have the walk-in cooler. So we’ll be able to actually have more space for sixtels in there. So more for our beer, more for guest beer, plus we’ll be able to move one of the fermenters in there.”

Herron said it will also help with things like cold crashing and carbing the beers, because the small glycol system they have is not really designed to ferment two beers at the same time.

“So yeah, just adding capacity to be able to brew more because that’s what makes me happy, and it’s fun,” he said. “And I think that’s what’s gonna get us to be more of like a normal brewery with different beer releases and more of our own beer on tap. And eventually, I hope all eight of our taps that we have are gonna be all of our beers, (but) that might be a couple years out. But, that’s what we’re working towards.”

Well, there are a lot of movie lines out there just waiting to be turned into beer names. Maybe some day the Crew will even get to pick one. Lord knows we quote enough movie lines amongst ourselves and our friends (Franz Solo can probably recite the entirety of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).

A bit thanks to Jesse for having us over. There was still a little of his stout, A Naked American Man Stole My Balloons (that’s from An American Werewolf in London), on tap and it’s quite a delightful example of the American style. Get some before the last keg runs dry this coming weekend.

Keep supporting local!

— Stoutmeister