Trap Door Brewing’s expansive Prairie View Station
Trap Door Brewing’s third location Prairie View Station is sitting high on our most anticipated upcoming beer projects of 2026.
In a time of craft beer industry retraction the 10-year-old Trap Door Brewing is a current success story. First opened as a small brewery taproom in downtown Vancouver in 2015, Trap Door expanded to Washougal, Washington in 2022 taking over the former Amnesia Brewing and Logsdon Farmhouse Ales location. Head brewer Jake Watt has led Trap Door to its most acclaimed run of beers over the past 5 years with back-to-back Great American Beer Festival gold medals for ‘Fresher Than Fresh’ IPA, and that was before they brought on co-head brewer Tristan Karosas, formerly head brewer of Yakima, Washington’s acclaimed Single Hill Brewing.
Prairie View Station is more than just a new tertiary outlet for Trap Door, the 42,000 square. ft. property acquired by Trap Door owner Bryan Shull and business partner Jim West is a brand new LLC for which to launch a family-friendly food cart pod. The project started with an opportunity too good to pass up: a one-acre parcel of land donated by developer Killian Pacific to Fort Vancouver Regional Library District (FVRL) who in turn sold it to West and Shull. The funds raised as part of the sale go to supporting library services and educational programs as a way to foster long-term community benefit and economic vitality. The construction is being headed up by Matt Loosemore of SUM Architecture, and civil engineers from Engineering Northwest.
"Trap Door had been looking to do a third location for sometime, we tried for Ridgefield but COVID stopped that in its tracks and thank goodness because it would have been too small,” says Shull. “This is just an extension of the original plan and its coming together really well as a perfect storm of good weather conditions in all aspects. Hard to say 'no' to that."
The new location is so untapped that it doesn’t have an address yet, but groundbreaking on excavation for the new construction is set for February 2026. Shull, experienced in project management from his days in the solar industry, see’s nothing but upside for the corner of 119th and NE 112th adjacent to WinCo, residential homes, and the Prairie High school.
“There is nothing out there, it's a dining desert, and land availability and land use just fell into place,” says Shull who notes the convenience of being placed halfway between central Vancouver and Ridgefield as well as the high school’s open campus policy that will offer some much needed variety and convenience for lunch breaks. Parking, also, will not be an issue with 40 some spaces on the site, and an agreement with neighboring WinCo for free spillover parking into their hundreds of additional spaces.
Prairie View Station (PVS) will be home to two rows of 14 total food trucks with covered awnings for the weather with Trap Door’s taproom in the center surrounded by extensive parking along the other two sides.
While Trap Door is the anchor business here, it is the huge selection of food trucks and the community space that is the center focus of the project. Where many food truck pods run into problems is the stress and low margins incurred by owner/operator run carts running up against rising utility costs and requirements from local governments as these developments become more popular. Combined with regular rents on their spaces in new locations that may not have the walking traffic to justify those costs at the outset. In some instances those trucks end up in direct competition to similar food trucks offering the same foods parked in the same lot.
Prairie View has a plan, an easy and appealing setup for each food truck to pull up or be towed into clearly designated parking spots with quick hook-ups to gas, electric, and water via utility poles for each station. Trash and sewer management are included in the custom build-out, a bonus of developing the property from the ground-up for this express purpose. There is even an indoor commissary kitchen for food vendors to prep their food and store supplies. Addressing competition concerns, the only nearby options are fast food like Taco Bell and Subway. Each PVS food truck will have an exclusivity agreement guaranteeing them no direct competition in their regional/ethnic cuisine, preventing multiple burger trucks for example. So far there are already letters of intent in for Shawarma, Thai, BBQ, Sushi, and Vietnamese, while Shull hopes to have different styles of diverse Mexican or South/Central American cuisine (example: seafood tostada’s and ceviche versus mole, burritos, or empanadas.)
“The model of low to the ground overhead and lots of choice has always been in my head. To be able to pull it off at a larger scale and to elevate the whole experience with the commissary kitchen on site and have the building so pronounced is kind of the next level,” remarks Shull of the plans.
Between food trucks and the glassy steel-framed brick and mortar indoor space is a romper room style turf suitable for picnics as well as food traffic, safe for kids and pets, and easy to clean for year-round enjoyment. There are areas for events, markets and music.
"It is a family friendly experience so it is top of mind to have a place where parents can turn their back on their kids for a couple minutes and know they are not gonna break something expensive. You can picture it as an outdoor play area,” says Shull.
PVS is indoor/outdoor with a variety of seating options and areas to gather. The lower levels of the structure have full awnings for cover and on the southside roll-up doors with outdoor heaters above beer hall style tables. An upper mezzanine level of the taproom structure has patio seating with fire pits and a view down to the indoor bar or the outdoor food trucks and surrounding neighborhood.
Union Pub will operate the indoor taproom, doing business as Trap Door Brewing. The 1,800 sq. ft. section of the indoors will be fully branded and shaped to recreate the Trap Door experience with live wood, their signature yellow and gray color scheme and placards for 20+ draft lines. There will also be a full liquor bar with cocktails and the successful pizza kitchen model that Trap Door has perfected at their second location in Washougal.
Despite the expansion into family friendly food truck pods and pizza, Shull has no plans to move away from high quality craft beer that has been a proven success. He also isn’t interested in chasing trends or even diversifying as far as seltzer, cider, or even non-alcoholic beer.
“Beer is not going anywhere,” says Bryan Shull.
“Luckily, I built a team that has their eye on excellence,” says Shull. “We stay a premium brand because we have a team that makes premium beer and we spend the money on the premium ingredients to make the premium product, and I think there will always be a space for that. The taproom model fits right into that philosophy. We can do some boutiquey type retail but it's just not the model that works for our brand. I'm not concerned about needing to do root beer and n/a beers, there are going to be winners in that space but if we enter we would be just throwing money at chasing other winning brands.”
Expansions like PVS are more about community and creating a culture surrounding the beer. It’s not in competition, its a symbiosis that helps the brewery maintain the premium and retain their margins and freshness by selling more beer over their own bars then competing on grocery store shelves. Taprooms will be where Trap Door leverages their successes and informs future projects, there may be more expansions like PVS in the future.
"We provide dozens of jobs and they become family, I prefer that to worrying about if my 6-pack is going to get knocked over by the other guy. Chasing distribution sounds like an awful way to spend my life. No thanks" - Bryan Shull.
Prairie View Station is targeting a fall 2026 soft opening starting with food trucks and then the roll-out of the expansive Trap Door Brewing taproom and pizza kitchen. It will all be rising up at the corner of 119th and NE 112th in the Brush Prairie neighborhood of northern Vancouver, Washington.
