On nearly four acres of oak tree-shaded land just outside of downtown Austin, Texas, Meanwhile Brewing Co. has positioned itself as one of the city’s premiere music venues. While it’s not completely unusual for an Austin brewery to be situated on an expanse of land with food trucks, delicious coffee, a cedar playground for kids, a soccer field, and a large brewing facility and taproom on-site, the one-year-old hotspot also touts a versatile outdoor event space. The stage gave numerous Austin and Texas musicians paid performance opportunities and residencies throughout the past year, a year when live performance gigs were hard to come by. Meanwhile has invested in state-of-art technology like the Allen & Heath SQ-6 and 96kHz DX168 portable expanders to create a versatile and intentional event space, thus changing the game for what breweries can be.
The 720 sqft, outdoor stage has an adaptable lighting and sound grid to meet the needs of any event, from DJ to singer songwriter to full on rock band. The venue’s capacity sits at right around 1,000 people, with technical design executed by Meanwhile’s Production Manager, Jamie Wellwarth. In addition to his role at Meanwhile, Wellwarth is a 15 year veteran at Nomad Sound and has held down key audio, tour, and production manager roles for artists like Janes Addiction, Social Distortion, and The Revivalists. When it came time to select a world-class console for Meanwhile, Wellwarth chose the Allen & Heath SQ-6.
“SQ has been a real game-changer for venues like Meanwhile,” notes Wellwarth. “There aren’t many consoles out there that strike the right balance of power and customization with workflow yet remain easy enough to operate for engineers of all levels. Once you throw in the solid build quality, great preamps, and the support of all the folks at Allen & Heath, there isn’t really the need to look anywhere else. The SQ fires out LR to a Neve MBP master buss processor and then to Nexo GEO S12 and RS18 mains. It also has a pile of flexible stereo mixes with both parametric and graphic EQ on every mix that we send to our QSC K12.2 monitors. What more could you ask for?”
Sporting a 3-tier, all metal chassis and an extruded aluminum light bar, the SQ-6 provides 48 channels and 36 busses of 96kHz audio for the venue. Utilizing the on-board SLink connection, audio can be routed as needed to and from a pair of DX168 portable expanders.
“The work that Jamie and the Nomad crew put into Meanwhile Brewing Co. is really amazing,” says Allen & Heath USA Marketing Director Jeff Hawley. “SQ was designed to check all the boxes for these sorts of applications and it is cool to see more and more world-class venues like Meanwhile turning to SQ as they build out new spaces or aim to upgrade existing or even historic spaces. This particular project was extra special as the Meanwhile team shared the love with musicians, technical staff and music fans when times got tough — we are truly honored to be part of the mix.”
