Popular brewery joins the East Bank gang

In less than three years, Samuel Norton and two friends-turned-business-partners have gone from brewing beer in a garage to having a brick-and-mortar brewery to having two tap rooms in different cities.

The Se7enth Tap Brewing Project’s latest expansion is a second tap room in Bossier City’s East Bank District (525 Barksdale Blvd.). That’s in addition to the Shreveport tap room and brewery (2640 Linwood Ave.).

“We opened a second location because we saw an opportunity to grow financially through the business,” said Samuel Norton, co-owner of Se7enth Tap Brewing Project. “You’ve got Shreveport and Bossier — they’re different from each other in a way. We’re divided by the (Red) river. Some laws have (changed) the last few years which have allowed breweries to have more opportunity to have these second tap rooms. Bossier was a good opportunity for us.”

Because of the nature of the Bossier building and where it’s located, the atmosphere is a little different from what you find at the Shreveport tap room.

“(Bossier) is more of a shotgun-style base in an old, renovated building. We have two bars. The back bar opens up on the weekends. We open up into the Hurricane Alley space, so the back bar kind of serves as a general hangout/walk-up space for people attending the concerts. We have our primary bar space — a long bar roughly 75 feet — that can seat 40-50 people. We have tanks from which we serve beer directly. They’re 10 feet tall. We’ve got four of them. They’re 250 gallons apiece. When you order a Don Pablo, our Mexican Lager, you will get that straight out of a tank, versus a tap wall.”

Something else that is different from the Shreveport tap room is that the Bossier tap room has a kitchen. That allows you to drink and eat.

“We’re serving bar food, but in a good way. We have smashburgers, loaded fries and wings. There are multiple sauces. We have several different loaded fries — chili cheese fries, bacon cheddar ranch fries — then we have a smashburger fry, where you take everything from a smashburger except for the bun and load up your fries. It’s junk food, but it’s upper-class junk food. It’s good.

It’s addictive.”

The Bossier tap room has a kitchen.

One thing that is the same for both locations is that all alcohol served at is made in-house.

“The one thing we did just add was seltzer cocktails. We brew a house seltzer, no flavorings.

It’s just a neutral seltzer. We’ll use our housemade flavors to create a cocktail-inspired seltzer based drink. We have one we call our Taparita. It’s a neutral base seltzer mixed on ice, on the rocks, with a house-made margarita mix. Everything involved alcohol-wise is just our seltzer, but our flavorings represent what you would get in a margarita-type beverage.”

The Se7enth Tap Brewing Project brews and sells beer out of its Shreveport brewery to distributors across the state. But Norton says its tap rooms are a significant part of the Project’s income.

“At the end of the day, the tap room sales have a greater return on investment, versus distribution sales. We still have beer and distribution and are still growing that, but with us being able to have a secondary tap room, we just see a little better return on investment versus growing in the distribution world. The new laws allow us to take advantage of a secondary tap room, and still be within a five-mile radius of our primary facility, so we can keep an eye on both locations without having to go to a completely different (area).”

For several years, Norton and friends were brewing beer as a hobby in a garage. Then in June of 2021, they opened the Shreveport brewery and tap room. Less than three years later, they’ve grown again. But Norton insists the hunger is still there.

“We’re all local. We’re here in Shreveport-Bossier. This is a home-grown operation. We were home brewers. We basically learned this in our garage and opened a brewery, never expecting to see us grow like this. We you come to our brewery, we still have that same mindset. We’re local. We resonate with the local community.”

To learn more about The Se7enth Tap Brewing Project, you may visit www.theseventhtap.com.

A long bar can seat 40-50 people and has 250 gallon beer tanks directly on tap.

Choose from several beers.

What’s a beer without bar food?