★ Southern Oak Brewing (308 Market St), with the Old Town bars and tasting rooms nearest to it. Tap a pin for details.
A black oak leaf is painted on the brick at 308 Market Street in Old Town Tomball, dated EST. 2026. Behind the doors, a wall of 28 taps is already mounted and waiting on beer.
That’s Southern Oak Brewing — a brewery and restaurant that plans to brew on site, trading under a line borrowed from the tree it’s named for: “Southern roots. Crafted together.” It opened on October 7.
Between the brewery’s own progress posts and a stack of state paperwork filed in August, there’s more on the record than a typical “coming soon” sign gives you. Here’s what we’ve pieced together.
Updated October 7: Southern Oak Brewing is open. The grand opening was today at 11 a.m., and regular hours are now in effect.
Updated September 21: the brewery has named an opening date, published its hours, and introduced the two families behind it. Those details are folded in below.
The short version
- Where: 308 Market St, in the 300 block — the former Fire Ant space, including the adjoining 310 storefront.
- When: Opened Wednesday, October 7, 2026, with a grand opening at 11 a.m. Regular hours run Tue–Thu 11 a.m.–9 p.m., Fri–Sat 11 a.m.–10 p.m. and Sun 11 a.m.–7 p.m., closed Monday.
- What: A brewpub with a full kitchen — the website bills it as a “great brewery and high-end restaurant.” Beer brewed on the premises, food service alongside it, and 28 taps on the wall.
Who’s behind it
Southern Oak is two Tomball families going in together: Kendra and Josh Schwaiger, co-owners of Paradigm Brewing Company, and Tatia and Doug George, the owners of Graze on North Elm. The brewer and the chef, in other words, are already running a brewery and a restaurant seven minutes apart on opposite ends of town.
The Schwaigers opened Paradigm in December 2021 in the Tomball Business & Technology Park, out past the 249 corridor — a production brewery with a kitchen and 13 taps, built on a philosophy the owners sum up as technology meeting technique. Josh came to it from the beverage industry proper, with time at Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Karbach Brewing behind him; between them the couple count more than 20 years across beer, sales and hospitality.
The Georges come at it from the food side. Doug spent 37 years with ClubCorp — including a stint as personal chef to the Dedman family, who founded the company — and trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, with further study at Greystone and Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Tatia has built her career in food and beverage, much of it as a director. They opened Graze at 208 N Elm in January 2022 and have been running Old Town’s upscale room ever since.
One address, two breweries
The 308 Market story is worth laying out end to end, because the turnaround has been unusually quick for Old Town. A storefront that closes in May does not normally have a named successor by June, a sign on the wall by July, and permits filed by August.
Fire Ant set the template the new tenant inherits. When it opened in 2018 it was billed as Old Town Tomball’s first brewpub, built around a 50-litre brew system with the tanks visible through glass from the seating area, a balcony overlooking Market Street, and separate indoor and outdoor bars. Its beers leaned German — an Oktoberfest-style seasonal, a hefeweizen, a doppelbock in late winter — and the food ran to pimento cheeseburgers and schnitzel sandwiches. Eight years in, the owners called it and retired.
That’s the room Southern Oak is walking into, and the model too: a space already plumbed for brewing and built around a working kitchen, with a patio and a balcony most Old Town storefronts would kill for. The business Southern Oak has filed for is the same shape as the one that just left — brewery and restaurant under one roof. What changes is who’s running it, and the scale of the bar behind them.
What they’ve shown so far
Photographs and artwork: Southern Oak Brewing.
The naming, for what it’s worth, is doing double duty. The announcement art places the brewery “nestled between South Oak Street, Market Street and Main Street,” and South Oak Street does run through Old Town within sight of the door. Southern oak, South Oak Street. Take your pick.
Why it matters for Old Town
Old Town Tomball has no shortage of places to drink, but the beer is thinner on the ground than the bar count suggests. 403 Eats Food Truck Park out on East Main is the real draft destination — two full bars and 17 taps. On Commerce, Drifter’s Dive Bar keeps a curated craft list beside its bourbon shelf, and The Bluebonnet Wine Bar next door pours Texas beer alongside Texas wine. The Empty Glass on Market and Tomball Social Haus on Fannin both keep beer behind the bar, though their bottle lists lean domestic rather than craft — wine and cocktails are the draw at both. And Thirsty Bee Meadery on West Main pours honey wine, not beer at all.
What none of them do is make it. Since May, the district has had a hole exactly the shape of a brewery — a place where the product is manufactured on the block it’s sold on. That’s the gap Southern Oak is filling, and it’s a meaningfully different draw: a brewpub gives visitors a reason to come to Tomball specifically, rather than a reason to stay once they’re here.
It also lands in the middle of the busiest stretch of storefront turnover Old Town has seen in years. Southern Oak was one of five businesses on the “coming soon” list in our spring openings roundup; it was the largest of the ones still to come, and it opened October 7.
What the permit file gives away
This is the part that hasn’t been widely reported, and it’s the most concrete thing available before a menu exists.
On August 12, 2026, three applications were filed with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission under the trade name Southern Oak Brewing. All three came through on September 1: the retailer’s permit is active with both subordinates attached, and runs to August 31, 2028. Read together, they sketch the business:
The brewpub license (BP) is the headline. In Texas it is the license that lets a restaurant manufacture, package and label its own malt beverages on the licensed premises and sell them right there — up to 10,000 barrels a year per location, with to-go containers permitted up to a half barrel. Without it, a place can call itself a taproom but has to buy its beer from somebody else. Southern Oak applied for it, which means the plan is genuinely to brew at 308 Market, not just to pour.
The food and beverage certificate (FB) is the quieter tell. It’s a subordinate certificate that attaches to the primary retail permit, and it requires the location to operate as a restaurant — permanent commercial cooking equipment on the premises, with entrées available any time alcohol is being served. It squares with the brewery’s own language about “great beer, great food,” and with the hiring list they’ve been circulating since July, which is heavier on kitchen than on taps: cooks, dishwashers, servers, bartenders, hosts, managers — and a brewer.
The retailer’s permit (BG) rounds it out, covering beer, ale and wine up to 17% ABV for consumption on site or to go. Notably, it doesn’t cover distilled spirits, so don’t expect a cocktail program.
The one hard number the brewery has published is the tap count. Its site says the finished bar will run 28 taps — “from crisp and refreshing to bold and full-flavored” — which is a lot of lines for a house capped at 10,000 barrels a year, and implies a share of them will pour guest beer alongside whatever comes out of the back.
What we still don’t know
Plenty, and it’s worth being straight about it:
- No menu. The website has a menu page, but as of opening day it still reads only “More info coming soon!” The opening tap list is unpublished too, and the August poll suggests the beer lineup was still being settled two months out.
- The website at southernoakbrewing.com is live but most of it is still placeholder. The Instagram account and Facebook page are where the real updates land.
Hiring is open in the meantime — the brewery has asked applicants for every front- and back-of-house role, plus a brewer, to send résumés to info@southernoakbrewing.com.
Sources: Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission licensing records published on the Texas open-data portal (license, subordinate and pending-application records for 308 Market St), retrieved September 1 and rechecked September 21, 2026; TABC license-type guidance and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Code; Southern Oak Brewing's own social posts, June–September 2026, including its September founders announcement; Community Impact and Houston Chronicle reporting on Paradigm Brewing Company and on Graze for the owners' backgrounds; and prior coverage of Fire Ant Brewing Company's opening and closure. Graphics by The Tomball Times.