Drinking buddy

Fair-Weather Friend has been the lone open outpost of the Ironworks District development at NW 2nd and Klein, serving fresh beers and hot pizzas for over a year.

Adrienne Jaskula isn’t your Fair-Weather Friend, but her brewery is.

Adrienne and her husband, Reed, moved to Oklahoma from Ohio several years ago. She managed the new Stonecloud taproom while he brewed beer at Prairie OKC.

A craft beer fan since high school, Jaskula took a wine-tasting class in college where she met an intern at a distribution company, which started her down a road that ended at 314 N. Klein Ave.

“Reed and I have been together for a long time. We used to go to this little craft beer bar in Kent, down the street from the campus and they had the best craft beer selection. We would go there all the time. And one day, we were just chatting and we’re like, ‘Let’s open a brewery someday. We love this. That’ll be the plan. I’ll get this internship and I’ll learn how to sell beer, and I’ll learn everything I can about that.’ And he decided he wanted to learn how to make beer and we kind of set off on our paths from there. And here we are now, after opening a bunch of breweries for other people, achieving our dream,” she said.

Fair-Weather Friend has an extremely diverse beer menu, from lagers and stouts and back again. There are no core beers, though some of the brews do make encore performances, often in modified forms.

click to enlarge Drinking buddy
Berlin Green
Don’t Monkey Around with My Heart.

On the menu, you’ll find beers like Better Get Bubbed, which is listed as a DDHHBIPAMWL on the menu. That stands for, “double dry-hopped hazy boy India pale ale made with love.” And there’s the Cowboy Siesta, which is an imperial stout that includes, among other things, coffee and cacao that are roasted on site in the wood-burning oven.

“We don’t skimp on our ingredients. The quality of our beers in that they’re unique and that we stand behind them is the most important thing for us. I’ll never dilute a beer for cost. That’s something that brewers get put in a position to do regularly. We just won’t do it. Sweet Afters is a billion dollars to make, but it’s delicious.Those stouts? A billion dollars to make. They’re delicious,” Jaskula said.

During the first half of the day, the brewery is a coffee shop for Prelude Coffee Roasters before the pizza oven is fired up and they start slinging beers with their pies at 4 p.m.

“People come here for a coffee. They enjoy it. They realize there’s a brewery here in the evening and there’s pizza. Maybe they want to come back at night or maybe they want to finish their coffee, work throughout the day and then have a beer. I think there’s a lot of synergy there as well. We use a lot of coffee and our beers. We’ve got a relationship with him and he’s creative and focused on quality and affordable coffee and so it just made sense,” Jaskula said.

Food was always baked into the concept, with barbecue as the original idea until the pizza plan came to fruition while Reed was recovering from back surgery due to the demanding physical nature of brewing beer with ingredients prepped and carried by hand.

“We make everything from scratch if we can. If not, it’s great quality,” she said.

They ferment the dough for the pizza in house for at least 48 hours before it’s served.

“Some of it ferments for five days, honestly. The longer the fermentation, the better. It’s more complex. It’s got that fermented complex flavor and crisp and fluff that checks all the boxes for the kind of pizza we’re trying to make, which is not Neapolitan. We make pizza the way we want to make pizza, whatever that style is,” Jaskula said.

Heretofore, the menu has been limited to three options, but she said they’re expanding their ingredients list so people can pick their own toppings on a regular basis.

“What’s getting weird is now have people that come in for the pizza that don’t get that we’re a brewery. They don’t understand we don’t have everything every week … We will always still have a special that’s curated based on the cool, fun things we want to do.” Jaskula said.

Fair-Weather Friend has also recently added cannolis to the menu and Jaskula said she hopes to add salads as a regular menu item soon.

“I always wanted people to come here and have the experience here. I want our bartenders to serve you the beer and to talk about it the way it needs to be talked about and to serve you pizza here and for the pizza to shine here. I also don’t think of it as a to-go product. People ask if the pizza is to go. Yes, it comes in a to-go box, but do I want to have it on Uber Eats? No, because I don’t think that’s what represents us. It’s artisanal pizza,” Jaskula said.

As far as the brewery’s name, Jaskula said that they had another name in mind for years — Here Nor There — but it was registered the month before they were set to snag it.

“I think about it now and I like Fair-Weather Friend. I like how it abbreviates to FWF. People call us fair-weather friends all the time, and I want to stop them and be like, ‘I’m not your fair-weather friend. The brewery is.’ That’s how I think of it. The brewery is your fair-weather friend. We’re here for the good times. I mean, I hope you’re not sad drinking here. We support you either way. The brewery is a place that I hope gathers the good times,” she said.

Coffee, pizza, salads. But she stresses that FWF is a taproom first.

“We’re a brewery with food, not a restaurant with beer,” Jaskula said. “I put everything into this. Beer, pizza, the experience, you name it,” she said.

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