Meanwhile Brewing Co.

Meanwhile Brewing Co. is Austin’s roughly 1,000-capacity concert setting inside a 3.7-acre South Austin brewery campus. Its defining draw is scale with air around it: a 720-square-foot outdoor stage sits among oak-shaded grounds, a soccer field, food trucks and a taproom. The result feels built for an evening that starts casually and gathers momentum as the music begins. It serves a crowd large enough for a full bill, yet keeps the brewery’s open-campus feel.

Built for gathering, then fitted for shows

Will Jaquiss, formerly of Portland’s Breakside Brewing, founded Meanwhile with Nao Ohdera; it opened to the public on October 16, 2020 as a brewery, taproom and entertainment grounds. The founding plan paired beer production with a live-music stage, DJ sets, storytelling and movie nights, placing performance inside a broader all-day gathering place. The site arrived amid COVID-era limits, then began socially distanced outdoor concerts in January 2021, giving performers a stage when Austin gigs were scarce. Its first-anniversary weekend on October 15–16, 2021 gave the idea a public marker: Riders Against the Storm and Jonny Jukebox played Friday, followed by Megafauna and A. Sinclair on Saturday. That December, production manager Jamie Wellwarth’s sound build put an Allen & Heath SQ-6 console and adaptable lighting-and-sound grid at the stage, formalizing the venue side of the brewery.

The room today

Meanwhile’s bookings sit across country, folk, R&B, Latin, pop, jazz, indie and rock, with free concerts alongside ticketed shows, classes and arts events. That mix suits listeners eager to discover regional acts and groups treating music as one part of a longer hang. The outdoor stage supplies adaptable lighting and sound; the taproom and outdoor bar give audiences places to regroup between sets, while food trucks and the turf field spread the crowd across the grounds.