Order a cocktail at PO Box 21, the speakeasy tucked beneath High Bank Distillery on South State Street, and you are drinking inside the building that once shipped forty tons of anti-alcohol pamphlets a month. The Anti-Saloon League of America ran its national headquarters and its own post office out of this exact address after 1909, printing so much temperance literature that the tiny village of Westerville earned a Class A post office normally reserved for towns many times its size. High Bank's founders knew what they were buying when they signed the lease. They call it ironic. They are not wrong.
That irony is not incidental to Westerville's current drinking scene. It is the scene.
The town that fought this hardest is the one still telling the story
Westerville passed one of Ohio's first local prohibition ordinances back in 1858, decades before the country caught up. When a businessman named Henry Corbin tried to open a saloon anyway in 1875, residents dynamited it. He rebuilt. They dynamited it again in 1879. Locals still call this stretch the Westerville Whiskey Wars, and the bombings passed their 150th anniversary last year.
By 1909 the town had built enough of a reputation on refusing alcohol that the Anti-Saloon League moved its entire operation here, and Westerville picked up the nickname that stuck for a century: the Dry Capital of the World. The Westerville History Museum, housed inside the library in the League's old building, still keeps the artifacts.
What makes the story interesting today isn't that Westerville used to be dry. Plenty of small Ohio towns were. It's that the town's current breweries treat that history as their entire brand rather than something to quietly outgrow.
Four breweries, four different relationships with the same past
Temperance Row Brewing Company opened in 2014 as the first legal brewery in Westerville, and it did not pick its name by accident. The Anti-Saloon League's leadership built their homes a few blocks from the brewery, in a cluster still known locally as Temperance Row. Owner Tony Cabilovski leans into the joke on the beer list itself: Corbin's Revenge IPA for the dynamited saloon owner, Prohibition Pilsner, Gunpowder IPA, and Hatchetation Pale Ale for Carrie Nation's habit of taking a literal hatchet to bar interiors. Cabilovski has described the location bluntly, saying they are pouring beer "about 200 yards away from the nucleus of people that didn't want it."
Not every brewery plays the same game.
- Temperance Row Brewing (41 N. State St.) built its entire identity around the town's dry history, down to the beer names.
- North High Brewing (250 S. State St.) took over the former Brazenhead space in partnership with the coworking company COhatch, with a front patio facing State Street and a back patio that abuts Westerville South High School. Owner Gavin Meyers calls it the brand's dream location for its parking, foot traffic, and patio space, not for any nod to Prohibition.
- Campfire Brewing (6300 Frost Rd.) started as four Westerville neighbors who home-brewed together in a garage before opening their own taproom on a former salvage yard site, complete with tabletop fire pits and s'mores kits. History has nothing to do with it.
- Grizzlybird Brewing (5901 Chandler Ct.) runs a veteran-owned taproom with twenty-seven pinball machines, darts, and a scratch kitchen. It is a neighborhood hangout first, and it does not bother referencing 1909 at all.
Two of the four make the irony explicit. Two just want to sell you a good beer. That split matters more than a simple headline like "Westerville has four breweries now" would suggest, because it shows a town that hasn't settled on one relationship with its own past. Some businesses are still having a conversation with 1909. Others have moved on entirely.
The math on how long "dry" actually lasted
Here is the number that gets flattened in most retellings: national Prohibition ended in 1933 with the ratification of the 21st Amendment, but Westerville did not become wet when the rest of the country did. Ohio law lets individual precincts vote themselves dry or wet, and Westerville kept voting itself dry, election after election, for another seventy-one years.
The first legal liquor license in Uptown Westerville wasn't approved until 2004, for a bar called Old Bag of Nails, and even that vote wasn't unanimous. A group calling itself STOP, for Safety and Tradition Over Profits, campaigned against it. Old Bag of Nails still stands, and the entrance to Uptown Untapped, the city's annual beer festival, runs right past its front door every August.
Michael's Pizza actually poured Uptown's first beer in 2006, after getting its own license following the 2004 vote. Plenty of Westerville residents today grew up in a town where a beer with dinner Uptown simply was not legal, a detail well within living memory rather than some distant historical footnote. This isn't textbook history. It's a decision a good share of current residents watched happen, or voted on themselves.
A festival that keeps working to make beer interesting again
Uptown Untapped started in 2017 as a novelty. Organizer Michelle Aventino remembers the first year plainly: it was the first time beer had ever been served on a Westerville street, and people could not believe it was happening.
Nine festivals later, minus a skip in 2020, that novelty has worn off, and the event's own organizers have had to work harder each year to keep it feeling fresh. After hearing complaints that a field of eighteen breweries produced too many heavy IPAs for a warm August night, this year's organizers trimmed the lineup to eleven Ohio breweries pouring thirty-two selections, added handcrafted cocktails from Asterisk Supper Club, and introduced a VIP early tasting hour with a commemorative glass. Beer still shows up in the details that connect to Westerville specifically: Wolf's Ridge brewed a hazy IPA created just for the festival, Spires Social poured a strawberry blonde ale named Uptown Girl for the neighborhood, and Temperance Row kept its Prohibition Pilsner on tap, still referencing the town's dry history even as the crowd around it treats a beer in Uptown as the least remarkable thing about their Saturday night.
"It's just the people gathered in the community," Aventino said of the festival's ninth year, describing how beer now sits alongside food, music, and conversation rather than carrying the whole event by itself.
That is the real shift worth noticing. Westerville didn't overcome its dry reputation by ignoring it. It built an entire hospitality identity on top of it, used that identity to draw crowds for nine straight years, and is now discovering that a beer festival in a town famous for banning beer eventually needs cocktails, curated food, and live music to stay interesting, because the shock value of beer alone doesn't carry a festival past its second decade.
What this looks like on an ordinary Tuesday
None of this requires a festival to notice. Walk Uptown on a regular weeknight and you can order a Prohibition Pilsner at Temperance Row, then walk two blocks and drink a cocktail inside the building where the Anti-Saloon League's own mail room once operated. Head north a few miles and Grizzlybird's pinball machines and scratch kitchen menu have nothing to do with any of it, just a solid patio and a veteran-owned taproom that locals treat like any other neighborhood bar.
That range, from a brewery that jokes about dynamited saloons to one that just wants to serve good wings, tells you more about how Westerville actually lives with its own history than any single "Dry Capital of the World" plaque can. The past shows up when a business decides it's good marketing, and disappears when a business decides it isn't. Both choices are true at once, on the same three-block stretch of State Street.
If you're the kind of neighbor who notices these details, block by block, you probably already have a good read on where Westerville is heading next. If you're weighing a move here, or wondering what your own Westerville street is worth in a market that keeps evolving as fast as its Uptown drink menu, Luxe Home Team can put together a complimentary market report built around the neighborhood you actually care about, not just the citywide averages.
