Commercial real estate brokers in Westcott, SC

The thriving brewery scene continues expanding across the Midlands, with Iron Hill Brewery and Restaurant being the newest location scheduled to open soon in Columbia's historic downtown BullStreet District.

The award-winning brewery, known for its signature beers and fan favorites, is headquartered in Exton, Pennsylvania, and the newest and the newest Columbia location will be the second in South Carolina; the other location is upstate in Greenville. According to Iron Hill Brewery CEO Chris Westcott, the Columbia site expands the company's footprint in the southeast to 21 total breweries.

Construction of the new brewery and restaurant has been ongoing for a while. For those wondering when the new location will open, Westcott said they are shooting for sometime in June. He added that the location is actively hiring local talent, and a temporary office is set up for walk-in applicants and interviews.

In anticipation of the grand opening, the location is hiring servers, cooks, dishwashers and more. Interested individuals can attend Iron Hill’s job fair Saturday, May 20 between 9 a.m. until 3 p.m. at their training center located at 2421 Boyce Street or apply online, here.

"First and foremost, we are hiring local," said Wescott. "Our management team has been hired; they've been commuting up to Greenville for training, and they are all local residents of the area. Our staff will be local, and we'll bring in staff from our home restaurants for training and development, but we invest in our staff, and we help them understand our version of hospitality. And we think it will complement what people are looking for here."

The seeming explosion of breweries across the Midlands stems from the Stone Bill signed by then-Governor Nikki Haley June 2, 2014. The bill allowed production breweries to serve food, eradicating consumption restrictions that previously limited patrons to 48 ounces per customer. According to information gathered by Wikipedia, as of 2021, there are 123 breweries currently operating across the state.

Standing out in an area where numerous breweries are located is no easy fete; however, Westcott said that Iron Hill offers a comfortable and causal ambiance outside the city, allowing its customers to relax and enjoy all the area has to offer. The brewery and restaurant also offers an eclectic food menu and a plethora of beer choices. He added that the location will feature a special branded local beer called 'the hometown tap.'

"About a month ago, we launched one of the biggest initiatives in our company. We launched 20 new beers, and each one was brewed for each location and named for that particular location. So we are in the process right now formulating the recipe and formulating the name of what the Columbia beer will be," said Wescott. "We're really excited about that, we call it the hometown tap, and that will be a featured product here, and I'm sure everybody will dig it."

To learn more about Iron Hill Brewery and Restaurant or to apply for a job, visit ironhillbrewery.com. To watch a behind-the-scenes tour of the new location, click here.

Two weeks of no-excuse-needed early voting kicks off Oct. 24 at more than 100 locations statewide, giving South Carolinians more options than ever for casting a ballot with hopefully little to no wait.

It’s South Carolina’s first general election under a Statehouse law signed by Gov. Henry McMaster in May which directed each county to open up to seven early voting sites for 12 days through the Saturday before Election Day.

All locations must open to voters from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. in all 46 counties from the coast to the mountains.

The exception is Oct. 30, as the law forbids Sunday voting.

Early voters can choose whatever site is most convenient for them within the county where they’re registered, whether that’s close to home, work or shopping. They aren’t limited by their home address.

“Early voting is a big deal for South Carolina,” state Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire said. “It gives a lot more access, more options for busy people to go vote. That’s the biggest benefit.”

It also should reduce stress on poll workers and give them more time to fix problems as they arise, which in turn also benefits voters, he said.

“Whatever line you’ve had before will be better,” Whitmire said.

The 111 early voting sites statewide represent a 35 percent increase from the total that opened before the June primaries, when election officers had less than three weeks to put the new rules into practice.

Nineteen of South Carolina’s rural counties are still offering a single location, usually at their main election office.

Some of the most-populous counties are providing several additional options. For example, Lexington went from one to five. Charleston County, which also offered a single site in June, is among three counties opening the maximum seven.

Greenville and Horry counties are the other two with seven.

Voting sites for every county can be found on the S.C. Election Commission website at scvotes.gov/voters/early-voting. By law, each county election office must also post local locations on its own website.

Voting absentee by mail is also underway. Those who qualify include people who are 65 and older, have physical disabilities, or work a job that doesn’t allow them to vote in person during the two-week early voting window. Applications must be in by Oct. 28. People returning a mailed ballot in person must show identification.

Charleston County, which has opened satellite offices since 2016 under prior law that required an excuse for voting early, has planned since January to open seven once the legislation passed. But when the final version didn’t allow for mobile sites as intended, the county reverted to one, but only for the primaries, said Isaac Cramer, director of the Charleston County Board of Elections.

Local sites for this election include four libraries and two churches spread out from Hollywood to Mount Pleasant, with the largest site being the North Charleston Convention Center. That was a popular spot for voters in November 2020, Cramer said.

Amid the pandemic, legislators passed a temporary law allowing no-excuse-needed in-person absentee voting for that election only. One problem was that access varied widely across the state. Even so, it marked the first time that more South Carolinians voted early than on Election Day.

Two years later under the new law requiring options with standardized hours, Charleston County has added sites on James Island, Johns Island and Hollywood.

“We wanted to expand to areas with population growth and rural areas so people across the county would have shorter distances to travel,” Cramer said.

The more than 150 additional workers hired specifically for early voting began weeklong training sessions Oct. 17. They’re prepared for busy, 12-hour days. They’ll stay on through Election Day at $15 an hour, which becomes $22.50 hourly for required overtime, he said.

In the Upstate, Greenville and Spartanburg counties each hired dozens of additional poll workers for early voting.

Staffing concerns are partly why Spartanburg went with three offerings for its first election with multiple sites, said its elections director, Adam Hammons.

Since turnout is generally lower for midterm elections than in presidential contests, “starting with three early voting centers that are fully staffed and ready for voters was our decision,” he said.

It’s among 10 counties opening three locations.

Others include nearby Pickens County, Dorchester County in the Lowcountry, and York County south of Charlotte, as well as rural Barnwell and Hampton counties along the Georgia line.

Georgetown and Beaufort counties are each operating four sites.

Georgetown officials didn’t see a reason to open the max, said elections director Aphra McCrea.

There was an obvious need for a location in the Waccamaw Neck, a peninsula east of the Waccamaw River that is where most voters live. The county office made sense as it’s already equipped to handle early voting. The other two were put in locations convenient for rural residents, McCrea said.

Lexington and Richland are the only counties offering five locations.

Richland County has had more shakeups at its long-troubled election agency in the last few months, to include the resignation of its director. But interim director Terry Graham, who also submitted a resignation letter before agreeing to stay through the elections, insisted the county is prepared for the election and early voting.

County officials considered expanding to six but decided it lacked sufficient workers and money for an additional site, he said.

“Money always is a deciding factor. If we could do more, we would do more,” he said. “We didn’t want to spread ourselves too thin by adding more people and more locations.”

Spencer Donovan contributed from Greenville. Leah Hincks contributed from Columbia. Mike Woodel contributed from Georgetown. Nicole Ziege contributed from Myrtle Beach.

A few weeks ago, I got my hands on a light modifier I've always wanted to have in our studio. Westcott's brand new Optical Spot is one of the coolest and most useful light modifiers I've ever seen, and in today's video, I'm going to show you why you might want one or two for your photography!

Over the years, I've accumulated a ton of photography gear. Most of it is essentials like cameras, light stands, tripods, and sync cables, but I also have a ton of crazy and quirky light modifiers and gadgets I thought I'd use but wound up never touching. The Optical Snoot by Westcott falls in the essentials category, and I'm already thinking of buying a second or third one because they are so useful.

What is an optical spotlight modifier? An optical spot is a snoot with a lens on the front that allows you to make a narrow beam of light and focus it to create sharp edges. If you've ever tried to create a sharp shadow across your seamless paper or project sharp foliage on your background, you know it's almost impossible to get anything that has a sharp edge. There is an amazingly technical book called Light - Science, and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting that helped me immensely when I first started trying to understand how lighting worked with photography. Without getting too geeky here, as the light leaves your flash and passes by the object you want to project against your background (known as a gobo or go-between), the light refracts and scatters as it hits the final material. This causes the edges to be blurred or out of focus.

The solution to this problem is to focus the light after the Gobo. By focusing the light after your gobo, you can project as soft or sharp as you want. For a system like this to be practical, you are going to need a specific light modifier that uses small gobos and a built-in lens so everything is easily mounted and easy to use. Luckily, there are a few options used by professionals, but many of these, like the Profoto Pro Zoom Spot by Dedolight, are over $1,000 used, and many of them are out of production. Thankfully, fashion photographer Lindsay Adler understood the need for a reasonably affordable alternative and teamed up with Westcott to produce the Optical Spot.

In the video above, I outline many of the features the Optical Spot offers as well as some of my criticisms, but I'll quickly give you an overview here in written form as well.

Advantages

This light modifier is super powerful and the possibilities are limitless. If you are a portrait photographer who wants to control the lighting on your background, the Optical Spot makes it incredibly easy to project any shape onto your canvas, seamless paper, or native wall. If you like shooting fashion photography and want to create strange and quirky lighting effects on your model's face, this thing makes that extremely easy as well. Perhaps you are a product photographer or shoot architecture and love to add specific highlights on your products or interiors. This will allow you to create the effect directly in camera and keep you from having to build it in Photoshop. Unlike large softboxes or tight reflector dishes, the Optical Spot is more than a one-trick pony and can give you a ton of options in a single package.

Disadvantages

Every awesome light modifier comes with a few drawbacks, and this light modifier is not perfect. The main problem is it is designed for strobes with LED modeling lamps to help keep everything running cool. In the video above, I use the Optical Spot with a Profoto D1 that has an incandescent bulb, which is not recommended by Westcott, and the modifier gets extremely hot. Like, grab your oven mittens hot! Another issue I had with this light modifier is something not unique to the Optical Spot but with all modifiers using a lens or fresnel is that you need someone managing the light while you shoot. I found it to be nearly impossible to get the perfect lighting on my subject's face while also maintaining a fluid and organic photoshoot. Having an assistant work with you and your model is going to make your life a lot easier.

Finally, there are a few design choices that I think could be improved upon, like making the Gobo holder a different size, shape, or color to help differentiate it from the four other metal leaves. Also, the mechanism for attaching the gobo holder itself isn't quite as elegant as it could be, and I found myself inserting the holder off-kilter. The mounting isn't something you can do without looking at the modifier; instead, you have to perfectly line everything up, which isn't as easy as you'd think.

Overall, I love this light modifier and think it offers a ton of lighting flexibility and creativity. In the test shoot I did in the studio, I used the light modifier up front and center with some crazy effects lighting my friend Christie Trainer. I think they turned out well, and I'm excited to play around with this style of lighting more in the future. As fun as these fashion-forward shots are, I can easily see myself using this light modifier more subtly by blurring effects on the background or creating dabbled light across a full set. The Optical Spot could also be super handy in lighting video sets where you want a specific pattern, say late day sun shining through trees, to be projected permanently through a modeling light. The possibilities are endless, and if you want to start projecting multiple patterns at the same time, I can easily see myself buying one or two more of these just to give the maximum amount of lighting options on more complex shoots.

Gear Used in This Shoot

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Iron Hill Brewery has laid out “a pretty aggressive growth plan” for the coming years as the Wilmington company looks to ramp up its presence in existing markets while also expanding into new states, CEO Chris Westcott said.

Part of Westcott’s strategy since stepping in as CEO last October has been an emphasis on growing the 20-location brand into additional territories, positioning it to “become a bigger player” in the hospitality industry, he said. Northern Virginia, Maryland and Columbus, Ohio are top of mind.

The goal is to open about five new locations per year for the next five years, he added. The first couple would be full-service restaurants, while the following few would be the company’s more fast-casual TapHouse model that got its start last year in Exton.

Iron Hill Brewery is using “a hub and spoke model” to actualize that growth, Westcott said, meaning the brand plans to enter new territories by opening a full-service restaurant and then “sprinkle in” some of the smaller-version TapHouses in the surrounding area. The idea is to increase brand awareness in a new market with the full-size product before branching out. In already established markets, the brand can dive right in to rolling out new TapHouses.

For example, a few years ago Iron Hill Brewery opened a full-service outpost in Greenville, South Carolina. It’s now looking at several sites in Greenville, Spartanburg and up into Charlotte, North Carolina, for potential TapHouses because the original Greenville outpost “is tucked in close to those other communities,” Westcott said.

Iron Hill Brewery currently has a location under construction in Columbia, South Carolina, and a year after its opening would look to debut TapHouses “in other pocket areas of Columbia,” Westcott said. The same is true in Atlanta, where Iron Hill Brewery currently operates two locations.

The expansion model takes extra planning as the company grapples with ongoing labor shortages and supply chain issues, Westcott said. Items that used to arrive in 12 to 16 weeks now come in 40 to 50 weeks, meaning you have to think a year in advance, he said.

“That just gets costly because you have requirements to open in a certain time from the point where you sign your lease,” said Westcott, who was formerly CEO of restaurant chain Rosa Mexicano. “So it's more stressful, it's more expensive. Cost is out of control.”

Westcott also sees “plenty of room” to build additional TapHouses in Pennsylvania “without cannibalizing” Iron Hill Brewery’s existing full-service restaurants. The brand is similarly eyeing additional space in South Jersey, where Westcott noted liquor licenses can go for three times the cost in Pennsylvania — which is already known to be hefty versus other markets.

New locations will largely begin launching in 2023. While the Covid-19 omicron variant dealt another blow to the hospitality industry at the start of this year, Iron Hill Brewery decided to spend 2022 focusing on revamping its existing fleet, which includes 20 locations throughout Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Georgia.

Special attention is being paid to refreshing Iron Hill Brewery outposts that are at least 15 years old, Westcott said. Many such locations have outdated layouts, including separated dining spaces that date back to former smoking and non-smoking sections.

Investments are ranging from $150,000 to $325,000 for improvements at existing locations, he added.

The Ardmore outpost is on the cheaper end of that scale, for example, while Lancaster is on the upper level because the brand looks to remove separation between dining areas, expand the bar, modernize design while moving away from the “older steakhouse-looking furnishings,” and revamp floor coverings.

Such investments will better bridge the older Iron Hill Brewery locations with the new forthcoming outposts, Westcott said.

As Iron Hill Brewery works to expand its reach, the company is also focusing on finding new ways to connect with customers.

One method is via an upcoming quarterly subscription program dubbed “The Craft Beer Society,” where members would have access to exclusive brews. Membership costs $40 per quarter and includes two 16-ounce cans of four beers.

Iron Hill looks to launch the program in time for Father’s Day.

Last year Westcott released the FJ400, a battery/AC powered strobe. If 400watts is overkill for you, Westcott has now released the FJ200 and FJ80 and all three lights work with the same remote system.

My favorite feature of the FJ400 was the universal remote (FJ-X2m) which works with Canon, Nikon, Sony with an adapter, FUJIFILM, Panasonic Lumix, and Olympus.

Maybe this isn't a big deal to the average photographer, but being that we are constantly reviewing camera gear, we never seem to have the right remote for the right camera brand. The universal remote is one less thing I need to worry about and it works with both of Westcott's new lights as well.

The FJ200 is a 200-watt battery powered strobe that is about the same size as a speedlight. It's one stop less powerfull than the FJ400 but less than half the size and weight. It has a daylight-balanced LED modeling light and a color screen on the back. The FJ200 has an exposed flash tube that will fill light modifiers more evenly and will be significantly brighter than other tubes hidden behind glass. It comes with reflector dish and grid/gel holder. The light comes with a standard umbrella bracket and Westcott is currently working on a speedring/lightstand mount for as well.

The FJ80 is Westcott's version of a speedlight. You can use it on camera (and it works with all brands like the remote), or you can use it off-camera in "client mode." My favorite feature of the FJ80 is that it can act as a remote control for other FJ80s, FJ200s, or FJ400s. The back of the FJ80 has a giant color touchscreen for navigation which makes using the flash extremely intuitive.

The FJ80 also has a range of accessories currently available and more on the way.

I only had two days to play with the FJ200 and FJ80 so this certainly isn't a comprehensive review but, from what I've seen so far, and considering the incredibly low prices, these lights are a fantastic value. If you're in the market for a new strobe system, definitely consider Westcott's FJ line.

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