Back Forty Beer Company has been brewing in Gadsden since 2009, but its Birmingham taproom, tucked into the Lakeview District on 29th Street South, operates as a quieter outpost of the original — a place where the beer travels better than the reputation does.
The space is straightforward: exposed brick, long wooden bar, booths along the wall, a patio that faces the street and fills up fast on mild evenings. It doesn’t try to be a destination so much as a neighborhood bar that happens to have twenty-odd taps and no bad seats. The staff tends to know regulars by order, which says something about the pace of the place.
The brewery built its name on Truck Stop Honey Brown, a malt-forward amber that remains reliable and easy to drink cold. But the Birmingham location tends to stock a rotating slate of small-batch releases that don’t always make it to the shelves at Total Wine — things like a dry-hopped Berliner or a barrel-aged seasonal that arrives with little fanfare and sometimes sells out in a week. Worth asking what’s new when walking in.
Food here is better than it needs to be. The pretzel comes out hot and dense, served with a beer cheese made from whatever’s on tap that week. The burger is thick, cooked correctly, and priced around twelve dollars. The menu is short by design, which keeps the kitchen from spreading too thin. On a Friday, the kitchen holds up well under pressure — a small thing, but noticeable.
Lakeview is a strange block to describe to someone who hasn’t been. It runs alongside the railroad tracks and has a loose collection of bars, a Vietnamese spot, and a few venues without obvious categories. Back Forty sits on the calmer end. It doesn’t pull the late-night crowd that some of the louder places on the strip do, which makes it a reasonable stop before nine o’clock — or the kind of place to retreat to when somewhere else has gotten too loud.
Pints run between six and nine dollars depending on the style. Happy hour runs weekdays until six and takes a dollar or two off draft pours. Parking along 29th and the surrounding streets is free and usually available before dark.
On weekend afternoons, the taproom draws a mix of people: cyclists finishing a ride, couples settling in before dinner somewhere else, regulars who come for the same beer every week. There’s rarely a wait for a seat in the early evening, which is not something that can be said for a lot of comparable spots in Birmingham right now.
Back Forty doesn’t get mentioned as often as some of the city’s newer taprooms, partly because it’s been around long enough that people assume they already know it. That assumption tends to undersell what’s actually on tap.
