Big Island Brewhaus sits at 2,764 feet in Waimea, which the brewery says makes it the highest brewpub in Hawaiʻi. Two of its beers have taken Great American Beer Festival medals: gold for Odin’s Sword in 2018 and bronze for Golden Sabbath in 2014. It picked up two World Beer Cup bronzes in 2014 as well.
The kitchen leans Mexican and works from local fish and Big Island beef, with the produce grown in Waimea. Most plates run $16 to $22, and the green chili stew it is best known for is $12. They don’t take reservations, and the doors are open daily from 11am to 9pm.
Good to know: 64-1066 Māmalahoa Highway in Waimea, (808) 887-1717. Happy hour is daily, 4 to 5pm, a dollar off beer, wine and cocktails. A pint is $9, a half pint $5.50, and a five-beer sampler $10. The brewery packages in cans rather than bottles now, a switch it made in 2023.
Thursdays are open mic and Fridays live music, both from 6pm to 8:30pm.
It’s still our first suggestion for dinner and a beer in Waimea, and the owners, Tom and Jayne Kerns, are usually somewhere on the property.
Tom spent about a decade running the Maui brewery that became Maui Brewing Company, where his beers won at both the Great American Beer Festival and the World Beer Cup, including a 2006 World Beer Cup gold for the Coconut Porter he created. He and Jayne bought a Waimea taqueria in 2008 and opened the brewery on the same site in March 2011.
More local breweries on the Big Island
The other brewery worth planning around is the Kona Brewing Company in Kailua-Kona. Its pub pours a rotating draft list that includes Backyard Batch beers you can’t get anywhere else, and it takes reservations through OpenTable, which the Brewhaus doesn’t. In 2021 the company opened a 30,000-square-foot brewery down the street from the pub, which runs hour-long tours daily between noon and 5pm, by appointment, $25 a head and 15 and over only.
Kona Brewing says everything it produces in Kailua-Kona stays in Hawaiʻi. The cans sold on the mainland are a separate operation, and that label’s own footer reads “Founded in Hawaii, Brewed on the Mainland.”
Hilo Brewing Company, which traded earlier as Mehana Brewing and then Hawaiʻi Nui Brewing, has closed for good. The tasting room on East Kawili Street is gone.