Hutton & Smith Brewing Co.

Walk into Hutton & Smith on MLK and you'll notice the walls before the taps. Puns about tectonic plates. A cat named Laverne. A brewhouse named after a layer of metamorphic rock. This is a brewery built by geologists — and it shows.

Joel Krautstrunk is the brewer. Melanie Krautstrunk is the CEO. They're married, they're geologists, and in 2015 they decided that what Chattanooga really needed was a brewery where you could drink an IPA while contemplating the Mohs hardness scale.

It sounds like a gimmick. It's not. The geology theme runs deeper than the label art (which, by the way, features actual thin-section micrographs of rock samples). Joel approaches brewing the way a field geologist approaches a formation: methodically, with reverence for the raw material, and with the understanding that what's underneath determines everything.

The beer backs it up. Since opening, Hutton & Smith has medaled at the Great American Beer Festival — the Super Bowl of craft brewing — and picked up hardware at competitions from local to international. Their IPA program is dialed in. Their stouts are serious. And the taproom, at 431 E MLK, has become one of those places where you go for one and stay for three, partly because of the beer and partly because the bartender will happily explain the difference between schist and gneiss while pouring your pint.

The rock that started it all

Joel and Melanie met studying geology. Not in Chattanooga — they came here after, drawn by the same thing that's pulled people to this valley for centuries: the rocks. Lookout Mountain. The Tennessee River gorge. The Cumberland Plateau an hour west. If you're going to be a geologist in the Southeast, Chattanooga is where the action is.

But they also loved beer. Good beer. The kind you couldn't reliably find in Chattanooga in 2013. So they started homebrewing. Then they started entering competitions. Then they started winning them. At some point, the hobby crossed the line where not turning it into a business felt like the riskier move.

They found the space on MLK — a corridor that was already starting to hum with OddStory, The Bitter Alibi, and a growing food scene — and spent a year of nights and weekends building it out. Friends hung drywall. Family painted walls. The brewery license, when it finally arrived in 2015, felt like a diploma.

Beer with a thesis statement

What separates Hutton & Smith from the dozens of other craft breweries that opened between 2013 and 2020 isn't the geology theme — it's the technical rigor underneath it. Joel is a master brewer who treats water chemistry like a lab experiment and fermentation like a controlled reaction. The result is consistency that's hard to find in small-batch brewing.

Their flagships — the Tectonic IPA series, the Gneiss Pale Ale, the Igneous Stout — have become Southside staples. But the real fun is in the experimental batches: pepper beers, barrel-aged projects, collaborations with other local breweries. If you want to know what Chattanooga tastes like in beer form, start here.

The taproom itself is what you'd hope for: dog-friendly, cat-adjacent (Laverne and Shirley hold court from their perches), and staffed by people who can talk about IBUs or igneous formations with equal enthusiasm. There's a private event space in back. There's a patio. There's usually a food truck parked nearby.

What's next

Hutton & Smith isn't chasing expansion. They're chasing depth. More barrel-aged releases. More experimental small batches. More reasons for the geologists of Chattanooga — and everyone else — to keep coming back to MLK. The brewery turns 11 next year. In craft beer years, that's practically veteran status. But for two people who measure time in geological epochs, they're just getting started.