Summerville’s Wood’s Ace Hardware has helpful local beer garden

Ace may be the place with the helpful hardware folks, but it’s not every Ace Hardware store that features its own beer garden.

Wood’s Ace Hardware, owned by Emily Wood Popielarz, is setting the bar high for weekend home improvement excursions with its addition of Bolts & Brews, a beer garden located within and behind the hardware store.

The spot opened at the end of 2023 and Popielarz said the Summerville community has been buzzing ever since. “It was really exciting to be able to show it to the community, and it was extremely well-received,” she said.

Popielarz said that she’d been considering adding something like Bolts & Brews to her Ace location for a while now. “As a mom of three, there was really no place in Summerville that I felt I could take my kids and hang out with friends,” Popielarz said.

Cheers to beers, wine and more

Bolts & Brews offers family-friendly events and activities, including their recurring Sunday afternoon event, Legos & Lagers, which is exactly what it sounds like: Kids play with legos, and parents drink lagers (or whatever suits their fancy). The spot frequently hosts live music, food trucks and trivia nights, too.

The beer garden features beverages for every kind of drinker, from pale ales to nonalcoholic seltzers | Joey Izzo

The beer garden serves wine and beer (as many local options as possible, of course), and soon, a slushie machine will crank out frosé. Popielarz said that she hopes to start collaborating with local breweries, too.

You can check out the full beer and wine list, which features a wide variety of brews, from pale ales to sours, online. Non-beer drinkers are in luck with their bevy of options, from wine to hard seltzers to NA sippers, too. There’s even a “flight of the week” for those looking to try four different beers at once.

“Summerville definitely had a need for an innovative kind of concept,” Popielarz said. “And I tried to do that while maintaining this hometown hardware feel at the same time.”

Popielarz said that word of mouth advertising has helped let locals know about the beer garden, but more often than not, most people quite literally stumble into Bolts & Brews during a hardware store run.

“Every single day we get people who are shopping for screws,” she said. “They end up walking through the greenhouse and they’re like, ‘Holy cow.’ ”

Bolts & Brews is open Thursday through Sunday. Learn more online at summervillebeergarden.com.