Salt Lake Brewing Co. Airport Pub: Why Your First Utah Beer Lands at Concourse A, Gate A20

Walk off the jet bridge at Salt Lake City International, take the escalator up to Concourse A, Level 2, and within ninety seconds you can be sitting at the long bar at Salt Lake Brewing Co.'s airport pub with a pint of Polygamy Porter in front of you — which, if you're new to Utah, is the most efficient possible introduction to how this state's craft beer culture works. The pint is real. The name is a joke that took forty years of state-by-state lobbying to get printed on a label. And the brewery that's pouring it has been at the center of every meaningful change to Utah's beer laws since Reagan was in his second term.

This is the front porch for Utah's brewing scene. Most of the inbound traffic at SLC is heading somewhere else — Park City, Snowbird, Moab, the Mighty Five, Yellowstone — and SLBC's Concourse A pub is built to be the first stop and the last stop. Burgers come out in under twelve minutes. The beer board is loaded. The TVs are on whatever game is running. And if you ask the bartender what's worth ordering before your connecting flight, you'll get a real answer instead of a sales pitch.

How Three Real Estate Agents Built Utah's Craft Beer Scene

The history matters here, because Salt Lake Brewing Co. isn't a chain trying to look local — it is, as directly as a 4 a.m. opening time will allow, the airport-facing branch of the company that built Utah's craft brewing industry from scratch.

In 1986, Greg Schirf — a Milwaukee transplant who couldn't find a decent beer in Utah — opened Wasatch Beers in Park City. It was Utah's first craft brewery since Lucky Lager closed in 1967. To get it open, Schirf had to personally lobby the Utah Legislature to change the law so that small breweries could sell their own product on premises. That's not an exaggeration. The Utah brewpub framework that everyone else now operates inside — Epic, Bohemian, Uinta, Proper, Roosters, RoHa, every one of them — was carved out of state code by Schirf's persistence.

Three years later, in 1989, Jeff Polychronis and Peter Cole opened Squatters Pub Brewery in downtown Salt Lake City — the first modern brewpub inside the city limits. By their own account, they spent a year before opening visiting more than forty brewpubs across the country and "trying nearly every beer in existence." The downtown Squatters location on West Broadway is still pouring decades later.

In 2000, Wasatch and Squatters combined their production breweries into the Utah Brewers Cooperative — a behind-the-scenes consolidation that let the two operations share equipment and scale up packaged beer for grocery and convenience-store sales. The pubs stayed separately owned. The Polygamy Porter that's now stacked on most Utah taprooms started life as a Wasatch beer with a name designed to needle the state.

Ownership history of the production side got more complicated after that — Fireman bought in 2012, CANarchy folded it in, Monster Energy acquired CANarchy in 2022 — but per a November 2023 Gastronomic Salt Lake City report, the restaurant group (the actual pubs, including the airport locations) was sold to local ownership and Salt Lake Brewing Co. now operates as the local-owned restaurant-side parent. That's the company you're handing your credit card to at Gate A20.

The Concourse A Pub: What Actually Comes Out of the Kitchen

The food coming out of the airport kitchen is better than airport food has any right to be. The menu reads like a slightly tightened version of what the downtown Squatters location runs — burgers, sandwiches, salads, brewpub sides — built to fire fast for travelers on a clock.

The Turkey Mushroom Burger is the order to know. "The standout items such as the Turkey Mushroom Burger and Southwest Chicken Sandwich have garnered rave reviews," reads one of the more detailed Tripadvisor compilations, which tracks with the four-figure review volume the pub is sitting on. The bison burger is the deep cut — Utah ranch country actually raises bison, and the pub gets it from regional producers — and reviewers consistently flag both for portion size. "The burgers had — Turkey and Bison — are actually quite good with quite big portion," one customer wrote, which is the kind of high-context, low-effort praise that airport pubs rarely earn.

Beyond the burgers: the signature nachos are layered enough to share with two people, the sweet potato fries come out crispy and salted heavy, and the kitchen runs a respectable gluten-free flag through the menu (the pub has its own dedicated GF page on FindMeGlutenFree, which is more effort than most brewpubs put in). The Southwest Chicken Sandwich is the move if you've been in the air for four hours and want something other than bread-and-cheese.

The beer list is the actual point. Polygamy Porter, the Squatters Hop Rising IPA, the Wasatch Apricot Hefeweizen, and a rotating cast of seasonals are all on tap. The Apricot Hefe is the one that converted a generation of skiers into hefeweizen drinkers — it shows up in every Utah-beer roundup that's been written in the last two decades. The Hop Rising is the IPA the Hop Rising-curious Coloradans and Pacific Northwesterners reluctantly admit holds its own. And the Polygamy Porter is the porter the bartender will hand you with a knowing look if you've never seen the label before.

The Service That Keeps a Four-Figure Review Count at 4.2 Stars

Airport restaurants live and die on service speed. SLBC's Concourse A pub is sitting on more than 3,300 Google reviews at 4.2 stars — a number that's not possible without a tight kitchen and a bartending staff that can read connections off a boarding pass.

Reviewers consistently call out specific servers by name. Diane and Kara show up in multiple Tripadvisor reviews as the people who saved someone's connection or pushed an order through when the kitchen got slammed. That kind of name-checking is the kind of detail that doesn't happen at chain airport restaurants — it's the kind of thing you only get from a place that's been training the same crew for years.

"Attentive staff, including notable servers like Diane and Kara, are often praised for their exceptional service," reads one of the longer review summaries. There are also negative reviews — some dry burgers, some slow drink service during peak hours — and the kitchen isn't pretending to be the downtown Squatters. But for a place that's open from 6:30 a.m. to midnight every day of the week, the consistency is the point.

Why This Pub Matters to Utah's Food and Beer Scene

The SLC airport renovation that wrapped in 2020 was one of the largest greenfield airport projects in the country, and the new terminal's dining program was, for the local restaurant scene, a referendum. The airport could have leased every concourse slot to national chains. Instead, the new SLC made room for actual Utah operators — Salt Lake Brewing Co. (Squatters and Wasatch), Uinta, Market Street Grill, a handful of others. Travelers who pass through the airport now leave with a coherent picture of the Wasatch Front's actual food and beer culture rather than the bland chain-food version they'd get at most American airports.

SLBC's Concourse A pub is the most-visited piece of that picture. More travelers eat at this airport pub than at any other Utah brewery's flagship. The pour they get here is the pour that gets associated with the state. That's a responsibility, and the pub has — to its credit — held the line on quality.

Salt & Seek's broader take on the Utah beer scene is that the breweries that built this state's craft culture are still the ones worth tipping. Schirf changed the law. Polychronis and Cole made it stick. The pubs they founded are still operating. And the airport pub at Concourse A is the version that most non-Utahns ever see. If you fly through here twice a year, this is your local.

Planning Your Visit to Salt Lake Brewing Co. Airport Pub

The pub is at Salt Lake International Airport, Concourse A, Level 2, near Gate A20. Phone is (385) 229-4002. @saltlakebrewingco

Hours: 6:30 a.m. to midnight every day of the week. That's a real schedule — they're open for early-morning flights and for the last red-eyes that push out after 11 p.m. Dine-in and takeout (carry it to the gate) are both options. The bar takes solo travelers; the booths handle small groups.

What to order: Turkey Mushroom Burger or the bison burger, Hop Rising IPA or the Apricot Hefeweizen, sweet potato fries on the side. If you've got time before a long flight, the nachos work for two. If you've got a connection to make, the Southwest Chicken Sandwich fires fastest. Polygamy Porter if you want the souvenir story.

This is why we live here. Utah's beer scene was built by a handful of Park City and Salt Lake City founders who spent years lobbying the legislature for the right to brew and pour. The pub at Gate A20 is where most travelers meet that history without realizing they're meeting it. Tip the bartender well. Ask for the Polygamy Porter. And if your connection is on time, do yourself a favor and order the Turkey Mushroom Burger — the kitchen built that one right.