Drinks
This Brewery Helped Hurricane-Ravaged St. John Put Itself Back Together
At the Tap Room, owners Kevin Chipman and Chirag Vyas handed out their housemade brews for free in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria. A year after the storms, the taps are running at full capacity.
Illustration: Jan Buchczik
The restaurant where chef Patrick Allen works survived a devastating fire and two Category 5 hurricanes. On some days, when he arrives to cook up mahi mahi tacos for a mixed crowd of tourists and locals, he wears a T-shirt with a severe weather logo and the words: THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.
“It adds a little levity to the situation,” he says. Allen works at the Tap Room, a pub and brewery that’s now thriving on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a territory hard-hit by Hurricane Irma in September 2017. But if you want the whole story of the bar, you have to go back 15 years. It’s a tale best told over a beer—and one, like many tales about craft brewing, that starts in New England.