Big Block Brewing in Black Diamond: Now the Only Brewhouse

As Washington Beer Blog reported, "It's a very quick turnaround, but getting brewing up and running in Black Diamond as soon as possible is crucial to keeping beers on the board," Jessica Harwood, Big Block Brewing's Director of Operations, told the blog the week her company shut down the taproom where it had brewed since 2018.

That taproom was in Redmond. The beer is now coming from Black Diamond.

On September 12, 2026, Big Block Brewing closed its Redmond location for good and moved its entire production operation to the pub it operates on 3rd Avenue in Black Diamond. If you've had a Big Block pour in Sammamish or Carnation recently, or you will soon, it started as grain and hops on 3rd Avenue, not in Redmond. The town that used to be the newest stop on a four-location map is now the only place the company brews anything.

A Company That Grew Away From Its Own Kitchen

Big Block started in 2013 the way a lot of Pacific Northwest breweries start: a family cooking beer in a garage on a five-gallon stockpot. The first taproom opened in Sammamish in 2015. Three years later, the company built out a production brewery and taproom in Redmond, and for most of the past eight years, Redmond was where the actual brewing happened. Sammamish poured it. Carnation poured it. Black Diamond, once it joined the map, poured it too.

That arrangement ran until last month. According to Harwood, foot traffic at the Redmond taproom had collapsed to the point that some days brought in only two or three guests, and revenue there had been sliding since the pandemic-era closures of 2020. Rising rent and operating costs on top of that made the location, in her words, "simply not sustainable." Rather than trim the whole company to keep a shrinking location alive, Big Block cut Redmond and pushed everything, brewing included, into Black Diamond.

Black Diamond joined the map for a reason that had nothing to do with a location closing somewhere else. Owner John Julum announced the deal in mid-2025 as a mutually beneficial arrangement with Lumber House, the brewery that had been running a pub on 3rd Avenue and was shutting it down. The location itself sits on Highway 169 between Maple Valley and Black Diamond, a couple of miles from the Ten Trails master-planned community, which is expected to bring roughly 15,000 new residents to that corridor once it's built out.

The Space on 3rd Avenue Has a History Before Big Block

The building Big Block now brews in wasn't built for them. It belonged to Lumber House Brewery, which had run a brewpub and pub kitchen at 30741 3rd Avenue for years before selling the space to Big Block in the fall of 2025. Lumber House said at the time it planned to resume operating somewhere else down the road, and Big Block kept one tap reserved for Lumber House beer as part of the handoff, a small gesture to a business that had built the loyal following Big Block was inheriting along with the address.

Big Block moved in that October and spent the following months settling into the space, according to Washington Beer Blog's coverage of the deal, slowly turning a former competitor's pub into its own. By the time Redmond's closure was announced less than a year later, Black Diamond already had a running kitchen, a working taproom and a staff in place, which made it the practical landing spot for production once Redmond's numbers gave out.

What's Actually Different at the Taproom Now

The Black Diamond location opened with 110 seats, a full kitchen serving pub food, and 20 taps of what the company calls its award-winning draft lineup, open seven days a week. The kitchen has stayed in expansion mode since. A Yelp listing for the location this year describes it as still "adding more to the menu as we go," with burgers, wings, chicken sandwiches and salads as the current core, alongside a beer list the brewery says spans 75 recipes brewed since 2013, 20 of which have won awards.

What changes with production moving in isn't the food. It's the beer's point of origin. Beer brewed at the Redmond facility used to travel to reach three of Big Block's four taprooms. Now Sammamish and Carnation are the ones waiting on shipments, and Black Diamond is the source. For a regular sitting at the bar on 3rd Avenue, that means the newest batch of whatever's rotating through the tap wall, whether it's the Blood Orange IPA or the Burn Out Black Ale that show up regularly in the brewery's stock lineup, comes from tanks a few dozen feet away rather than a truck from another city.

Harwood told Washington Beer Blog the transition was designed to move fast enough that nobody at Big Block lost a job over it. "We are fortunate not to lose any staff during this transition, everyone is staying on," she said. The Redmond team's work now happens under the same roof as the 3rd Avenue kitchen, which means the Black Diamond location picked up staff along with equipment.

The Small Town Now Supplying Two Others

There's something worth sitting with here that has nothing to do with beer preference. A brewery chain with four locations spread across the Eastside and South King County looked at its map and decided the newest stop on it should be the one everything else depends on. Sammamish has been Big Block's home base since 2015. Redmond had eight years of production history. Black Diamond had been open for less than a year when it became the company's only brewhouse.

That's not a story about beer quality. It's a story about what a business is willing to bet on when it's choosing where to root itself. Big Block landed in Black Diamond in the middle of the Ten Trails buildout, then kept betting on the town when Redmond's numbers gave out. Whatever else is true about a town of this size, it's currently the place supplying Sammamish and Carnation, the company's other two taprooms.

Production moved into the building just two weeks ago, a quick turnaround for a location that had been open for less than a year.

Growth stories like this one, a business consolidating around a town rather than pulling out of it, are exactly the kind of signal we track at The Misener Group when we're helping clients understand where this corner of Pierce and King County is headed next. If you're curious what else is shifting around Black Diamond and the Lake Tapps corridor, we're always glad to talk it through.