While there aren’t really any “silver linings” to the coronavirus pandemic, there are stories of how some people have at least used the lemons that the crisis handed them to make lemonade, to quote the old maxim.
Today, I will write about one such tale, one that should get beer lovers here in Western Massachusetts excited.
I met Josh Cohen, owner of Moe’s Tavern, a few years after he opened the popular beer bar in Lee. I had visited the place as part of a beer field trip organized by Building 8 Brewing’s O’Brian Tomalin (although he hadn’t opened Building 8 at that point).
I immediately fell in love with Moe’s. It carried great beer, had a great atmosphere and Josh and his staff were pretty much perfect in terms of knowledge and attitude.
It was the opposite of beer snobbery yet carried itself with a certain confidence about what it offered as far as craft beer.
Well, as with all bars during the pandemic, Moe’s had to close back in March. But Josh has made great use of the down time, as he told me in a recent telephone interview. He and his crew have been renovating Moe’s and it sounds like the place will come back even better. He is hoping to be open in some way by March of next year.
Josh said that the renovations all had been on a list, but none were so crucial that they would cause him to close the place to do them. But once the coronavirus forced a shutdown, he decided to use the time to address all of them.
"When I bought this building 14 years ago, we always knew it had defects.
And after about five years we had to fix some things, but the things that were left were the biggest things," Josh said. “It had a lot of the same problems that a lot of old New England town buildings had. But we knew that someday, one of the big things was just going to break, and when it broke, we were going to have to fix everything at once.”
Renovating the bathrooms, the overall plumbing and repairing the roof were some of the fixes needed in the 1874 building. Once the shutdown occurred, Josh had to take a serious look at the future and how to make it work. Although he didn’t use COVID-19 protocols to dictate the renovations, he knew that the space had to change one way or another.
“So going forward, it was either new Moe’s or no Moe’s,” he said.
So although the iconic bar has been torn out, Josh wanted to keep the casual feel of the place.
“We separated where the bartenders are away from the rest of the space, but it’s not really that different. It’s a walk-up bar now. And the bar seating is just all throughout the place. It’s still the same barstools,” he said. “We’re going to have the same intimacy whether we’re busy or not.”
The renovations have also allowed him to dig further into the building itself and gain about 500 square feet of customer space. So while his occupancy is 72 customers, there are still only 12 seats.
“Even if you took the COVID out of the equation, I think I would’ve come up with this new layout anyway,” he said. “I think we’ve enhanced the social aspect. We’re making the room more welcoming.”
While Moe’s wasn’t really a classic “dive bar,” it did have a working-class gritty feel to it. Should regular customers worry that the new Moe’s will be fancified? Josh said no one should worry. And Josh always has a humorous way of summing things up.
“It was very important for us to keep the patina of the old bar. I still have all of my old bar stuff. All that stuff is going back up on the walls. I still have a concrete floor, and we’re still gonna play the music too loud,” he said. “I guess the main message is, ‘Don’t worry everybody, the old vibe is very important to me; you’re just not gonna fall into the basement when you’re standing in front of the toilet anymore.’”
November 09, 2020 at 01:44AM
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Beer Nut: Moe’s Tavern in Lee gets a makeover - MassLive.com
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