Sabey Corp. buys Rainier Brewery site

SEATTLE — A developer has bought the original Rainier Brewery site for $9.9 million and plans to convert it into stores, light industrial businesses, offices and homes.

Sabey Corp. bought the 5.5-acre site from Rainier Cold Storage and Ice last week. The property includes four former brewery buildings: a brew house, malt house, bottling plant and general office.

There are currently 65 tenants at the site, including Georgetown Brewing Co., coffee roaster Caffe Umbria, aeronautical engineers AeroTEC, Big People Scooters and many local artists.

Jim Harmon, Sabey’s senior vice president of investments, said those tenants’ leases will expire over the next five years. Sabey likely will start renovations and structural upgrades of the masonry buildings in a year and a half and finish in about six years, Harmon said. He declined to discuss plans for new buildings on the site.

The Seattle Brewing & Malting Co. built the plant in 1903. At the time, it was the sixth-largest beer producer in the world, Sabey said.

The plant stopped brewing when the state adopted Prohibition in 1916. After booze became legal again in 1933, the Emile Sick family bought the plant but decided to build a modern brewery at Spokane Street in south Seattle to reintroduce Rainier Beer.

The Seattle City Council declared the brewery site a local landmark in 1993.