Carbon Copy, specializing in beer and wine, will take over Dock Street’s space in West Philadelphia

Dock Street Brewery’s West Philadelphia location marks its last call this weekend.

This will make way for the space’s new occupant, Carbon Copy, a brewery and pub from industry veterans Kyle Wolak and Brendon Boudwin.

Wolak and Boudwin, who worked at Tired Hands in Ardmore but quit in 2020, plan to brighten the interior of the old firehouse at 50th Street and Baltimore Avenue and open around Labor Day with beers and what they call “easy pub food” created around the wood-burning pizza oven.

They don’t want to pigeonhole themselves as a “brewery” or “taproom” — rather, as beer and wine makers. (Wine will be made in their Kensington warehouse.)

Boudwin, 33, started his career working in the front of the house at Tired Hands. He started brewing at Modern Times Beer in San Diego. After returning to Tired Hands, he built and ran a quality lab and its oak fermentation facility, and also started programs focused on low intervention, natural wines, ciders, coffee, and spirit-barrel-aging beer. He also navigated state and federal compliance to establish a food manufacturing facility to produce and package kombucha and cold-brew coffee.

» READ MORE: Dock Street Brewery to close its West Philadelphia brewpub, open a tasting room in Fishtown

Wolak, 32, started as a line cook at Three Floyds Brewing Co.’s brewpub in Indiana when he was 16, transitioning to the brewery when he turned 21. He spent the next five years as a production brewer before relocating to Copenhagen, to open and oversee brewing operations as head brewer at Warpigs Brewpub. (That was a collaboration between Three Floyds and the Danish brewery Mikkeller.) After three years, he returned to the States for a job at Hill Farmstead Brewery in Greensboro Bend, Vt. A year later, he moved to Tired Hands to become head brewer at its Fermentaria production facility, where he spent three years.

Before striking out on their own to create Carbon Copy, they sought counsel and employment from brewery veterans at their last jobs — Wolak with Ken Correll at Human Robot, Boudwin with Stew Keener at Bar Hygge. When Dock Street founder Rosemarie Certo told Keener that she was thinking of moving on from the location, Keener suggested that Boudwin take a look. “The size of the place is nice and intimate,” Boudwin said. “We can build a neighborhood bar on top of the beers.”

The idea of filling a landmark was intriguing. “We were really excited to carry the torch as the next generation,” Wolak said.

“I mean, they’ve been there for 15 years and they were the first proper microbrewery in the Philadelphia area [when Dock Street opened in the mid-1980s]. The opportunity to be able to carry it on and breathe new life into the space is really interesting and exciting for us.”

And the name: ”We were always kind of worried about maybe people considering us to be a carbon copy of another brewery, or trying to jump on the latest trend of what’s popular,” Wolak said.

“It’s a tongue-in-cheek reminder to ourselves not to be a carbon copy of someone else and just find what we want to do, focus on that, and let our interests and the interests of the community dictate our path, not the trend of the moment.”