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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Fisher back in black, and red

Rick Bonino

Local craft beer pioneer T.W. Fisher is getting back in the business, though not as a brewer.

Thomas W. Fisher opened Coeur d’Alene Brewing and its accompanying T.W. Fisher’s brewpub in 1987 and scored a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival for his Centennial Pale Ale in 1988.

Now Fisher is launching the Midtown Pub at Fourth and Montana in Coeur d’Alene, which he hopes to open in June. But he won’t be brewing again, as some have speculated.

“My beer-making days are done,” Fisher said. “It’s just going to be a little neighborhood pub.”

Well, not just any neighborhood pub. “I want to make it like a 100-year-old bar,” he said, with plenty of glass and dark cherry wood accenting the old wooden floors from the building’s early days as Woodcock’s Drugs.

And there will be much memorabilia from the former T.W. Fisher’s and more. “There will be a lot of things to look at,” Fisher said. “I tell people, you’re going to have to come in and see it because you won’t believe it.”

He’s already painted the building bright red with black trim, in traditional Irish pub style, and restored the Woodcock’s-era windows that later were removed when the building became Empire Cleaners.       

Plans call for 14 taps with a selection leaning toward local craft beer, plus wine. There also will be a small kitchen turning out the likes of salads, soups and sandwiches; Fisher has hired Tony’s chef CJ Fox-Lopp, who also set up Daft Badger Brewing’s food operation, as a consultant for that.

Fisher has worked in real estate the past 15 years after selling Coeur d’Alene Brewing, which later closed. He’s also continued to dabble in the bar business, most recently in Post Falls with Club 41 (now Lounge Fly), which he opened in 2010 and sold two years later.