★ Southern Oak Brewing (308 Market St), with the Old Town bars and tasting rooms nearest to it. Tap a pin for details.
A black oak leaf is painted on the brick at 308 Market Street in Old Town Tomball, dated EST. 2026. Behind the doors, a wall of 28 taps is already mounted and waiting on beer.
That’s Southern Oak Brewing — a brewery and restaurant that plans to brew on site, trading under a line borrowed from the tree it’s named for: “Southern roots. Crafted together.” It says it opens in October.
There’s no opening date yet, no menu and no tap list. But between the brewery’s own progress posts and a stack of state paperwork filed in August, there’s more on the record than a typical “coming soon” sign gives you. Here’s what we’ve pieced together.
The short version
- Where: 308 Market St, in the 300 block — the former Fire Ant space, including the adjoining 310 storefront.
- When: October 2026. In a September 1 post the brewery said it is “officially just weeks away.” No day has been named yet.
- What: A brewpub with a full kitchen — the website bills it as a “great brewery and high-end restaurant.” Beer brewed on the premises, food service alongside it, and 28 taps on the wall.
What the permit file gives away
This is the part that hasn’t been widely reported, and it’s the most concrete thing available before a menu exists.
On August 12, 2026, three applications were filed with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission for the premises listed as “308 Market St Including 310,” under the trade name Southern Oak Brewing. All three are still pending review. Read together, they sketch the business:
The brewpub license (BP) is the headline. In Texas it is the license that lets a restaurant manufacture, package and label its own malt beverages on the licensed premises and sell them right there — up to 10,000 barrels a year per location, with to-go containers permitted up to a half barrel. Without it, a place can call itself a taproom but has to buy its beer from somebody else. Southern Oak applied for it, which means the plan is genuinely to brew at 308 Market, not just to pour.
The food and beverage certificate (FB) is the quieter tell. It’s a subordinate certificate that attaches to the primary retail permit, and it requires the location to operate as a restaurant — permanent commercial cooking equipment on the premises, with entrées available any time alcohol is being served. It squares with the brewery’s own language about “great beer, great food,” and with the hiring list they’ve been circulating since July, which is heavier on kitchen than on taps: cooks, dishwashers, servers, bartenders, hosts, managers — and a brewer.
The retailer’s permit (BG) rounds it out, covering beer, ale and wine up to 17% ABV for consumption on site or to go. Notably, it doesn’t cover distilled spirits, so don’t expect a cocktail program.
The one hard number the brewery has published is the tap count. Its site says the finished bar will run 28 taps — “from crisp and refreshing to bold and full-flavored” — which is a lot of lines for a house capped at 10,000 barrels a year, and implies a share of them will pour guest beer alongside whatever comes out of the back.
One address, two breweries
The 308 Market story is worth laying out end to end, because the turnaround has been unusually quick for Old Town. A storefront that closes in May does not normally have a named successor by June, a sign on the wall by July, and permits filed by August.
Fire Ant set the template the new tenant inherits. When it opened in 2018 it was billed as Old Town Tomball’s first brewpub, built around a 50-litre brew system with the tanks visible through glass from the seating area, a balcony overlooking Market Street, and separate indoor and outdoor bars. Its beers leaned German — an Oktoberfest-style seasonal, a hefeweizen, a doppelbock in late winter — and the food ran to pimento cheeseburgers and schnitzel sandwiches. Eight years in, the owners called it and retired.
That’s the room Southern Oak is walking into, and the model too: a space already plumbed for brewing and built around a working kitchen, with a patio and a balcony most Old Town storefronts would kill for. The business Southern Oak has filed for is the same shape as the one that just left — brewery and restaurant under one roof. What changes is who’s running it, and the scale of the bar behind them.
What they’ve shown so far
Photographs and artwork: Southern Oak Brewing.
The naming, for what it’s worth, is doing double duty. The announcement art places the brewery “nestled between South Oak Street, Market Street and Main Street,” and South Oak Street does run through Old Town within sight of the door. Southern oak, South Oak Street. Take your pick.
Why it matters for Old Town
Old Town Tomball has no shortage of places to drink, but the beer is thinner on the ground than the bar count suggests. 403 Eats Food Truck Park out on East Main is the real draft destination — two full bars and 17 taps. On Commerce, Drifter’s Dive Bar keeps a curated craft list beside its bourbon shelf, and The Bluebonnet Wine Bar next door pours Texas beer alongside Texas wine. The Empty Glass on Market and Tomball Social Haus on Fannin both keep beer behind the bar, though their bottle lists lean domestic rather than craft — wine and cocktails are the draw at both. And Thirsty Bee Meadery on West Main pours honey wine, not beer at all.
What none of them do is make it. Since May, the district has had a hole exactly the shape of a brewery — a place where the product is manufactured on the block it’s sold on. That’s the gap Southern Oak is filling, and it’s a meaningfully different draw: a brewpub gives visitors a reason to come to Tomball specifically, rather than a reason to stay once they’re here.
It also lands in the middle of the busiest stretch of storefront turnover Old Town has seen in years. Southern Oak was one of five businesses on the “coming soon” list in our spring openings roundup; it’s now the largest of the ones still to come.
What we still don’t know
Plenty, and it’s worth being straight about it:
- No exact opening date. October is the month; the day hasn’t been announced.
- No menu. The website has a menu page, but as of September 1 it reads only “More info coming soon!” The opening tap list is unpublished too, and the August poll suggests the beer lineup was still being settled two months out.
- No hours.
- Permits are still pending. All three applications remain “in review.” That’s normal for this stage — Fire Ant’s own permit predated its opening by a year — but nothing is final until they’re issued.
- The website at southernoakbrewing.com is live but most of it is still placeholder. The Instagram account and Facebook page are where the real updates land.
Hiring is open in the meantime — the brewery has asked applicants for every front- and back-of-house role, plus a brewer, to send résumés to info@southernoakbrewing.com.
Sources: Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission licensing records published on the Texas open-data portal (pending applications and license history for 308 Market St), retrieved September 1, 2026; TABC license-type guidance and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Code; Southern Oak Brewing's own social posts, June–September 2026; and prior coverage of Fire Ant Brewing Company's opening and closure. Graphics by The Tomball Times.