BIZ BUZZ

INVESTING IN MICRO BEER

Bottle shop seeks to compliment town’s offerings

TAYLOR — A husband-and-wife business duo decided to turn one of their favorite hobbies into a retail venture featuring a wide variety of libations by the bottle.

Kirsten and Mark Sheldrake have opened the Neighborhood Bottle Shoppe, 120 W. Second St., Suite G, located in Hayley’s Grains previous site.

The store, which debuted a few months ago, offers craft beer, natural wine and mead by the individual bottle.

“There’s obviously a cool community within beer in Taylor, thanks to the Loose Screw and Texas Beer Co.,” Mark Sheldrake said. “And so our vision was to kind of bring something that wasn’t those two things, but complimented them as well.”

Kirsten Sheldrake said she used to work at a bottle shop in the United Kingdom and missed the experience after the couple moved to Taylor in 2020.

Sheldrake enjoyed bottle shops in Austin, but did not want to regularly make the drive.

The store is stocked with beer both from local breweries and from countries such as Germany and Belgium.

“The exciting bit about buying beer is that we get to try and find new beer all the time,” Sheldrake said. “We’re never going to have the same thing all the time.”

The bottle-shop model allows customers to try a beer without committing to a pack of the product.

Customers at the Neighborhood Bottle Shoppe can buy beer ranging from $1.99 a can to $70 bottles.

Mark Sheldrake said giving visitors plenty of options was a main goal when they started.

“One thing we definitely wanted to achieve when we opened it was for the shop to have a beer for everyone,” he said.

While the couple said they would like to host more events in the future, they believe the business has hit its stride just a few months in.

The Sheldrakes believe their connections with breweries across the world allow them to bring unique beverages to their store refrigerators that people will be interested to try.

“I actually think we’ve done better than we’ve anticipated,” Kirsten Sheldrake said. “I don’t think we are going anywhere. The craft beer community has been super supportive of us.”

Hours are noon to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.

NEIGHBORHOOD BOTTLE SHOP

120 W. Second St., Suite G For more, call 512-253-2314 or visit www.neighborhoodbottleshoppe.com/.