Pluton Brewing Company
Company description
Pluton Brewing Company is Brownsville's first craft brewery — for years, the only one — now operating as a full brewpub in a 5,200+ square foot building in downtown Brownsville at 805 E. Elizabeth Street, serving beers like a Russian Imperial Stout and Hefeweizen alongside a food menu. The company's own 2021 Startup Texas pitch put it simply: "Craft breweries won't come to Brownsville, so one will come FROM Brownsville." Pluton applied to the Startup Texas Pitch Summit in 2020, lost, came back in 2021, and won a $20,000 grant — sponsored by the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation (BCIC) — which was paired with an additional $80,000 from BCIC's BIG program to help the brewery scale its production capacity.
The company started in 2015 as a hobby among three childhood friends from Brownsville's west-side Galaxia neighborhood — Daniel Arizpe, Joey Martinez, and Daniel Brashear — who began brewing beer together at Arizpe's father's house on Calle Pluton, which gave the brewery its name. As Arizpe told Edible Rio Grande Valley, Austin's Jester King Brewery was a major early inspiration, and the friends realized Brownsville had no version of the brewery-as-gathering-place culture they'd fallen in love with elsewhere. What started as backyard brewing grew, over nearly a decade, into a full commercial operation with interconnected kettles, tanks, and fermenting equipment.
Founders: Daniel Arizpe (Founder, Co-Owner), Joey Martinez (Co-Founder), Daniel Brashear (Co-Owner), and Ricardo Presas (Co-Owner)
Program: 2021 StartUp Texas Pitch Summit, 2020 and 2021 cohorts
Website: pluton-brewing-company.com-place.com
Facebook: facebook.com/@plutonbrewingco
Address: 805 E. Elizabeth Street, Brownsville, TX 78520