Drive past 8111 Dimond Hook Drive on a Friday evening and the parking lot that used to fill up by 5:30 sits empty. No neon, no line for The Loft, no bikers pulling in for a growler fill before the weekend. Midnight Sun Brewing Company, the brewery that put Hillside East on Anchorage's beer map back in 1995, has closed its taproom for good.
If you have lived here a while, that sentence probably landed with a small jolt. Midnight Sun was not just a bar. It was the neighborhood's anchor for three decades, the place where a Tuesday could turn into a Thursday and where the Thursday tour crowd got to watch the mash tun work from the Loft's upstairs windows. So the obvious question is what happens to Hillside East's drinking culture now that the original is gone.
The answer is stranger and better than a simple void. The neighborhood's brewing identity split in two more than fifteen years ago, and both halves are still pouring within a few minutes of where Midnight Sun used to sit.
The taps went quiet, but the story started in 2010
Midnight Sun opened as Anchorage's first brewery, the second oldest in Alaska after Alaska Brewing Co., which started in 1986. For most of its run it operated as a production brewery first and a taproom second, distributing kegs and bottles as far as California and Hawaii while running The Loft as a tasting room with a full kitchen upstairs. That dual identity, big production house with a cozy bar bolted on, is part of why its closing feels different from a restaurant simply shutting its doors. There is no single building to walk past and remember. There is a whole distribution footprint that has to reroute.
But the story that actually explains what happens next started long before this year. In 2010, Midnight Sun's head brewer, Gabe Fletcher, left to start his own place. Fletcher had walked into Midnight Sun in 1998 at 21 years old looking for a bottling job and was running the brewhouse a year and a half later. When he set out on his own, he did not take a step back from the barrel-aged, funk-forward beers that made Midnight Sun famous. He took that whole side of the identity with him.
Anchorage Brewing Company is where Midnight Sun's wilder half lives now
Fletcher's Anchorage Brewing Company, at 148 W 91st Avenue, is built entirely around the barrel fermentation and Brettanomyces work that Midnight Sun was known for at its most ambitious. The lineage is direct enough to trace by name: Midnight Sun's Arctic Devil Barleywine became the seed for Anchorage Brewing's own barrel-aged barleywine, A Deal With the Devil, which took the title of Best Barleywine in the World at the 2017 World Beer Cup.
"I started brewing at Midnight Sun when I was 21 years old in 1998."
That is Fletcher describing his own start, and it is worth sitting with for a second. The brewer who is now producing some of the most decorated sour and barrel-aged beers coming out of Alaska learned the craft at the same building that just closed. If you loved Midnight Sun for its weirder, oak-aged releases rather than its pub burgers, Anchorage Brewing Company is not a replacement. It is the original branch that already grew somewhere else. The tasting room runs Monday through Thursday from 2 to 9 p.m., Friday from 2 to 11 p.m., Saturday from noon to 11 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 9 p.m., so the late Friday and Saturday hours actually outlast what Midnight Sun's Loft used to offer.
King Street Brewing picked up the after-work habit
If your Midnight Sun routine was less about barrel programs and more about stopping in after work for a pint and something to eat, the neighborhood's daily habit has shifted to King Street Brewing Company at 9050 King Street. King Street has been open since 2011 and runs a genuinely simple schedule: noon to 9 p.m., every single day of the week, food available the entire time. That kind of predictability, no odd Sunday hours, no seasonal shuffle, has made it an easy default for people who just want a table without checking a website first.
The taproom leans traditional where Anchorage Brewing leans experimental, with year-round offerings like a Czech pilsner, an APA, and a Bavarian hefeweizen rounding out the tap list. It also runs a daily rotating food truck outside and, more recently, has been building out its own kitchen with weekly specials, from a reindeer cheese steak to a stout s'more brownie. Locals have voted it into the top five for Best Beer List in the Best of Alaska readers' poll, which is not nothing in a city with as many breweries as Anchorage has. The rooftop seating is the detail regulars mention most, along with the free popcorn machine that has become something of a running bit among reviewers. If you want a stand-in for Midnight Sun's easy, come-as-you-are weeknight energy, this is where the crowd went.
The rest of the map never moved
It is worth saying plainly that Midnight Sun's closing does not touch most of what makes Hillside East's food and drink scene work day to day. Kaladi Brothers is still the neighborhood's coffee stop for anyone getting an early start before a Bird Ridge hike. Southside Bistro is still the fine-dining option for a night that calls for something a step up from pub food. Sushi Garden and O'Brady's Burgers and Brew are still running their usual lineups, and Manhattan House Bar is still the low-key option for a drink that has nothing to do with craft beer at all. None of these places depended on Midnight Sun's presence, and none of them are affected by its absence. The closing is a brewery story, not a neighborhood story, which is exactly why it is easy to overstate.
What actually changed, and what did not
Here is the honest read. Hillside East did not lose its brewing identity when Midnight Sun's taps went dry. It lost the single building where two very different versions of that identity used to live under one roof. The ambitious, barrel-driven side of Midnight Sun has been thriving a few minutes away at Anchorage Brewing Company since 2010, run by the same brewer who built Midnight Sun's reputation for that style in the first place. The easier, come-in-after-work side has quietly migrated to King Street's rooftop, which has spent the last several years becoming the kind of daily default that Midnight Sun once was.
If you have lived in Hillside East long enough to remember when Midnight Sun's parking lot was the busiest spot on Dimond Hook Drive, the closing is a real loss. But the neighborhood's beer culture was never really one place. It split apart over a decade ago, quietly, the way these things do, and both halves turned out to be worth the drive.
If you are the kind of resident who tracks these changes because you actually live here and plan to keep doing so, that is exactly the local read the Calling Alaska Home team tries to keep current on Hillside East and the rest of Anchorage. And if a friend or family member ever asks you what their place on the Hillside is actually worth in this market, our free home valuation tool is a good place to start the conversation.
