The Brewmaster Came Home: Center Boulevard's Long Game in Fairfax, California

The building at 765 Center Boulevard has held onto its brewing equipment through three names and at least two ownership groups. The kettles never left. Neither, as it turns out, did the person running them.

For close to twenty years the address belonged to Iron Springs Pub & Brewery, a family-friendly brewpub that became the kind of place locals measured other restaurants against. When Iron Springs closed, a newer operator called HenHouse took over the space. That run was short. A new brewpub, Fairfax Brewing Company, opened in the same building in the summer of 2024 and is now well into its third year of service, seven days a week, with a menu and a beer list that reads less like a fresh start and more like a continuation.

The detail that makes this more than a real estate footnote is who is behind the taps. Fairfax Brewing Company's brewmaster is Larry Berlin, the same person who was the original brewer for both Ross Valley Brewing Company and Iron Springs Pub & Brewery, the brewery that spent two decades in that exact spot. The chef, Dan McGarry, previously cooked at Duke's in Huntington Beach and at one of Guy Fieri's Sonoma restaurants, and by most accounts he returned to Fairfax rather than arrived in it. The owners, Alex and Lisa Stricker, are already known in Marin for State Room Brewery and the Flatiron sports bar in San Rafael.

What Didn't Transfer, and What Did

The interruption between Iron Springs and Fairfax Brewing matters as much as the bookends. HenHouse operated in the space for a brief period between the two, and the current team took over the building afterward. Their approach was to build on what the address had already established rather than start from scratch. They brought back the person who built the original beer program and let him keep making it.

You can taste the continuity in the names on the tap list. Fairfax Brewing pours a beer called Repack Red, a nod to Repack Road above town, and the Marin Museum of Bicycling and Mountain Bike Hall of Fame sits close enough to downtown Fairfax that it shows up on hotel and restaurant listings as a landmark in its own right. A second house beer, Tamalpais Tripel, names the mountain that shapes the town's skyline and its trail network. These aren't generic seasonal names picked to sound local. They're the kind of names you only choose if you already know what the town cares about.

The food leans the same direction without becoming a museum piece. Alongside the fish and chips and Caesar salad that Iron Springs regulars would recognize, the current menu runs pork lumpia, japchea noodles, and a Korean fried chicken sandwich, additions that came in with McGarry rather than holdovers from twenty years ago. The formula seems to be: keep the person, keep the room's family and dog-friendly feel, and let the specific dishes evolve.

A Fall Calendar Built the Same Way

The same pattern shows up if you look past the brewery to how the rest of downtown runs its fall calendar, which is dense enough this year that it is worth laying out plainly.

• Fairfax Art Walk, its seventh annual staging, ran downtown on September 25, with local shops hosting artists, live music, poetry readings, and a scavenger hunt for the evening.
• Fall Equinox Family Festival, organized by a local group called Mama Tree, takes over Peri Park's Green Stage on September 27 from 4 to 7:30 p.m., centered on families and the change of season.
• The Fairfax Theatre Company staged its nineteenth annual production at the Fairfax Pavilion on September 26, with a matinee and an evening show the same day.
• The Wednesday farmers market at Bolinas Park, 142 Bolinas Road, runs 4 to 8 p.m. through October 28, closing out a season that opened back on May 6.
• The Fairfax Chamber of Commerce's second annual Bolinas BBQ & Roller Disco Party lands on Saturday, October 11, with the Tom Finch Band playing and Fishmonger Don running an oyster bar alongside roller skating for kids.
• The Fairfax Soup Walk, a self-guided, ticketed tasting event, sends attendees between roughly ten to fourteen participating restaurants across downtown and the Sir Francis Drake and Center Boulevard corridor, the same stretch where Fairfax Brewing sits.

None of these events were imported. The Art Walk is run through the Town of Fairfax's Recreation and Community Services department in partnership with an Artist in Residence Collaborative made up of working local artists, including photographer Stephanie Mohan, painter Sharon Virtue, and Susan Pascal Beran. The Fall Equinox Festival comes from a named local organizer rather than a national event promoter. The Chamber runs its own BBQ and its own Soup Walk. This isn't a coincidence of small-town scale. It's a structural fact the Chamber states outright: it receives no direct funding from the town and runs entirely on memberships and the proceeds of events like these. The calendar exists because local businesses and volunteers pay for it every year, not because an outside organization drops programming into Fairfax and moves on.

The Same Mechanism, Twice

Line the brewery story up against the event calendar and the same mechanism appears in both places. Fairfax Brewing Company built its program around the one person whose knowledge of the space and the town's taste carries over from the Iron Springs years. The Art Walk is in its seventh year, the Chamber's BBQ is in its second, and the farmers market is in its latest of many seasons, because the people organizing them are the same people who showed up the year before, funded by the same local memberships rather than an outside budget.

Iron Springs held its address on Center Boulevard for twenty years, and the common thread in these local institutions is the people who already have Fairfax's trust standing behind the counter.

If you're downtown on a Wednesday between now and October 28, the farmers market at Bolinas Park runs until 8 p.m., which leaves enough daylight to walk it and still make it to Fairfax Brewing Company for dinner before the kitchen closes at 9.

Mershad Rezayati writes about the towns he works in because understanding what makes a commercial block durable is the same skill that goes into evaluating a piece of income property. If you're thinking about buying, selling, or holding real estate in Fairfax or anywhere else in Marin, Mershad Rezayati is glad to talk through what you're seeing on the ground.