Schlafly Tap Room

The Saint Louis Brewery was incorporated in 1989 by Tom Schlafly and Dan Kopman, who bought a burned-out building on Locust Street that had sat vacant for over 22 years and turned it into the Schlafly Tap Room, which officially opened on December 26, 1991. It was the first brewery to open in St. Louis since Prohibition — and, holding Missouri's first microbrewery license, the first new brewpub in the state since Prohibition as well. Schlafly still bills itself as the founder of St. Louis craft beer and the original locally owned, independent craft brewery in Missouri, and the restored brick Tap Room in Downtown West remains its flagship.

Schlafly is one of the few St. Louis breweries brewing its own non-alcoholic beer, and it makes two, both year-round and both under 0.5% ABV. The NA IPA delivers juicy, tropical IPA character with aromatic notes of mango and guava and a crisp finish; the NA Pale Ale is a copper-colored, non-alcoholic take on the 1991 flagship Pale Ale, smooth and balanced with slightly bready, caramel flavors from the malts. When the NA Pale Ale launched for Dry January 2024, trade press confirmed it was pouring into coolers at the Tap Room and at Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood — as the brewery put it, 'Pale Ale was the beer that started it all for us back in 1991, so it only made sense to offer a non-alcoholic option.'

The Tap Room experience is classic brewpub: hefeweizen-battered fish and fries, jagerschnitzel, the Tap Room Burger and pretzels with white cheddar sauce, plus trivia on Tuesday nights at 7pm. Feast Magazine's 2025 feature on how St. Louis breweries are adapting to a more diverse, sober-curious drinking scene featured Schlafly's longtime brewmaster, a sign of how seriously the city's original craft brewery takes the shift. One practical note: Schlafly's NA beers are packaged in cans rather than kept on the rotating draught list, so ask your server for the NA IPA or NA Pale Ale by name. Hours run Monday through Saturday from 11am and Sunday from noon, with the kitchen open until 9 or 10pm depending on the night.