Our Story

Welcome to Moon Hill Brewing Co. & the Gardner Ale House, located at 74 Parker Street, Downtown Gardner.

Gardner Ale House is the home of Moon Hill Brewing Co., a distributing micro-brewery. We are also a full-service restaurant & serve Moon Hill’s renowned craft beers! These beers, since they are now distributed outside the Gardner Ale House, are known as Moon Hill Brewing Co. beers.

Gardner Ale House is one of only a very few brewpubs in both North Central Massachusetts and Worcester County. It is a family style pub and restaurant featuring fresh, bistro style food in an upscale setting. The brewery offers 14 or more distinctive, house made brews and continues to develop new recipes. There is always an interesting, new beer on tap at the Gardner Ale House. The restaurant distinguishes itself through the use of fresh, unfrozen and unprocessed products. Menu selections are both ordinary and eclectic, but always of a high quality and very interesting.

Gardner Ale House is an active member of the community, participating in chamber events, holding regular fundraising events and contributing to the local dining and nightlife scene. As the greater Gardner area continues its rapid growth, the Gardner Ale House plans to provide the best food, craft beer and entertainment in the area, 7 days a week, offering lunch and dinner as well as our Sunday Live Jazz Breakfast!

Moon Hill Brewing Co. – The Origin Story 

So, a software engineer walks into the city planner’s office and says “I want to start a brewpub in your fine city.” The city planner, sporting a wide grin, says “If I had a nickel for every software engineer that walked in here saying that, well, I’d have more than a couple of nickels.” Some joke, huh? It is doubtful he ever met the likes of our software engineer, but I suppose, judging by his “Really, kid?” kind of response, that he sure had entertained a few others with similar dreams. City planner was having fun at the expense of our earnest, beer crazed, ‘young’ man. In his best Arnold Schwarzenegger, young man says, “I’ll be back.”

Next, our software engineer walks into a bank, says: “I wanna start a brew pub and I need a loan.” Banker loves the story, just can’t find any money earmarked for ‘crazy guy wants to start a brewpub in the middle of nowhere.’

So, another bank, and same lack of money for crazy guy looking to go broke fast.

One more bank. This banker is amused. Feels like he’s got a live one and wants to reel it in and see if it’s not just another boot on the sea floor. He sends our would-be entrepreneur away with a task: Trim like 30 pages off your business plan (It was close to 75 pages.) and get me some EBITDA numbers, real ones. After looking up EBITDA, our earnest entrepreneur realizes he might have just caught himself a banker. And our banker has nailed his favorite speaking engagement story: software engineer starts a brewpub. Moon Hill Brewing Co. is born one year later at the location of the Gardner Ale House in Gardner, MA.

Moon Hill Brewing Co. is named after Moon Hill in Lexington, MA, a neighborhood of architecturally interesting homes and interesting people. It was a neighborhood conceived by idealistic professionals seeking a more deliberate and practical suburban lifestyle. Out of this ‘hood was born an architect’s daughter, Katrina, who married this guy named Rick, a would-be brewer. 15 years later Moon Hill Brewing Co. (MHB) was begun in Gardner, MA. The year was 2006. Rick had already pursued his other interests: biomedical electronics, high school physics education (Would you believe girls’ basketball coach too?) and software engineering, which took up nearly 30 years, and which brings us here.

At the very beginning of 2017, the Moon Hill Brewing Co., at the location of The Gardner Ale House (GAH), a popular brewpub, began distributing its beer outside the doors of the venerable ‘Ale House’. We are still located at the brewpub, but have a second location at the Brew Barn on Red Apple Farm and are looking at one or two other interesting projects. We’ll let you know!