Few corners of downtown Fairhope have changed hands and fortunes as dramatically as the intersection of Church Street and De La Mare Avenue. For a stretch of the 2020s, the long-shuttered bed and breakfast on that corner came back to life as Ferus by the Bay, a brewpub that poured beer from one of Birmingham’s most successful redevelopment stories and gave downtown Fairhope a big, music-friendly deck overlooking one of its busiest walkable blocks.
The restaurant has since closed its doors, and a new tenant has taken over the storefront, but the story of how Ferus by the Bay came to Fairhope — and what it says about the way Alabama’s best redevelopment ideas travel — is worth retelling.
It Started in Avondale
The roots of the Fairhope brewpub run through the Avondale neighborhood of Birmingham. Coby Lake, a Birmingham real estate investor, saw potential in a part of the city that most people had written off. He bought a loft apartment there, moved his offices in, and kept purchasing dilapidated properties until he owned roughly a dozen buildings, nearly all of them in need of major renovation.
The centerpiece of that effort was Avondale Brewing Company, which opened in October 2011. Its success pulled everything else along. Post Office Pies, Fancy’s on Fifth, Melt, Saw’s BBQ and the Saturn music venue followed, and Avondale turned into one of Birmingham’s go-to entertainment districts — a transformation in which a single brewery acted as the anchor tenant for an entire neighborhood’s revival.
Alan Alford was there for most of it. A Homewood native, Alan spent ten years working in his father’s business, Central Motors, before the 2009 recession reshaped the real estate appraisal trade and pushed him toward his real estate license. That is where he crossed paths with Lake, and the two began buying, renovating and selling investment properties together. When Avondale Brewing was sold to Good People Brewing Company in October 2017, Alan stayed on for a couple of months to help with the transition.
A Second Act in Trussville
The partners did not stay idle for long. The City of Trussville approached them about redeveloping a tired city block on one of its main streets, much of it old industrial property with tired storefronts. A 22,000-square-foot warehouse there became the production home of Ferus Artisan Ales, and just as Avondale Brewing had done for its neighborhood, the brewery became the focal point of the Trussville redevelopment. Other tenants followed the anchor, repeating the pattern that had worked on Birmingham’s Southside.
The Move to Fairhope
Fairhope entered the picture the way a lot of good ideas do: from a front porch. Lake had moved to Fairhope and was living in the large white house across the street from the long-closed bed and breakfast at Church and De La Mare. Sitting on that porch, day after day, he saw potential in the dormant corner building.
He and Alford bought the property and began renovations just as the pandemic arrived, which stretched what should have been a straightforward project into a sixteen-month slog. In August 2021 the two effectively swapped places: Alford and his wife Kathy moved down to Fairhope to run the new restaurant, while Lake returned to Birmingham. Alford’s son Taylor rounded out the ownership and operating team.
The concept borrowed deliberately from the Trussville playbook. Ferus by the Bay poured beers from the Ferus Artisan Ales production facility in Trussville, kept a full bar and wine list, and served an upscale pub menu — burgers were the headliner, along with appetizers like the pimento cheese and pita. Alford talked early on about pushing the menu toward local favorites, seafood especially, with the kitchen’s own twist.
The physical space was the real draw. The renovated building offered a cool interior with TVs, a patio out front on Church Street, and — the feature everyone remembered — a large elevated deck out back that caught the breeze and the downtown Fairhope scene. Daily drink specials, a happy hour from 2 to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and a seven-day operation with Mondays dark rounded out the rhythm of the place.
A Corner Reborn
Timing gave the opening an odd flourish. Church Street had been torn up for construction when the restaurant opened in the spring of 2022, and by the time the street work was finished, it felt as if the brewpub were reopening all over again. The refurbished block, the new traffic patterns, and the deck all fed into the same idea: downtown Fairhope’s walkable core was getting a fresh burst of energy, and Ferus by the Bay wanted to be part of it.
For a stretch, it was. The deck hosted long summer evenings, the Trussville beers gave Fairhope something it had not quite had before, and the restored corner building — a piece of the city’s early-20th-century fabric — got a new lease on life after decades of sitting dark.
The Changing Tide
Fairhope’s restaurant scene is famously competitive, and it has churned rapidly in recent years, with beloved openings and closures arriving in quick succession. Ferus by the Bay eventually joined the list of closures, and the Church Street storefront it occupied has since been claimed by Café Viola, a French-Creole restaurant and tearoom concept that now anchors that same stretch of downtown.
That is not an unusual ending for a restaurant, but it is an instructive one. Ferus by the Bay was an experiment in transplanting a proven redevelopment formula — brewery as anchor, food and music as the draw, historic buildings as the stage — from Birmingham to the Eastern Shore. The formula worked in Avondale and in Trussville, and for a couple of years it gave Fairhope a lively new gathering spot within walking distance of the pier.
The corner, meanwhile, keeps its momentum. The building that sat derelict long enough for a neighboring porch-sitter to daydream about it has now hosted two restaurant concepts in three years, and the block around it remains one of the liveliest in downtown Fairhope. In coastal Alabama, that is often how a city grows: not in grand master plans, but in restored corners, poured concrete and tapped kegs, one redevelopment at a time.