A project years in the making came to fruition April 15 as Spur City Brewery officially launched with a celebration at Steel Hands Brewing in Cayce.

Spur City is a new brand created by University of South Carolina students under the leadership of School of Hospitality and Tourism Management faculty members Scott Taylor, Jr. and Robby Lybrand.

More than 300 people attended the launch event, with a portion of proceeds going to fund scholarships for College of HRSM students.

Beers released by Spur City will be created by students in the College of Hospitality, Retail and Sport Management’s Craft Beer Production and Sales class, taught by Taylor and Lybrand. The class is open to all USC students who are at least 21 years old.

The first beer, Garnet & Black Lot Lager, was available on tap and in cans at the launch event at Steel Hands. It will continue to be available on tap there, with wider distribution to come.

“We're hoping to have this beer distributed out to the public. Some local hotels, restaurants have already been saying they want it. We're also going to see if we can get it into some of the bottle shops in town,” Taylor says.

The long road to the launch started in March 2024 when the College of HRSM’s Beverage Education Lab opened.

“We put the beer equipment in there and my thought all along was ‘How can we get our recipes brewed by somebody else to raise scholarship money?’ And then it kind of morphed into building a brand around it,” Taylor says.

In the spring semester of 2025, Taylor held a competition in his Beverage Marketing and Sales class, open to all USC students regardless of age. The students came up with ideas for a brand name, graphics and other marketing materials and pitched them to Taylor, Lybrand and other HRSM faculty and staff. “Spur City Brewery” was the winner.

The following fall, Lybrand and Taylor taught the Craft Beer Production and Sales class for the first time, and that group of students came up with the recipe for Spur City’s first beer.

The College of HRSM and the USC Alumni Association partnered with Steel Hands to produce Spur City beer in quantities large enough for sale.

The first Spur City beer will be on tap at Steel Hands beginning with the launch event April 15, with cans to be produced soon after.

“We're hoping to have this beer distributed out to the public. Some local hotels, restaurants have already been saying they want it. We're also going to see if we can get it into some of the bottle shops in town,” Taylor says.

The first Spur City beer is an amber lager, one of Chef Instructor Lybrand’s favorites, but the decision on that was a team effort, as future beers will be. The collaboration is Lybrand’s favorite part.

“After a lot of collaboration, a lot of talking, a lot of dreaming, to see everybody enjoying this beer is very humbling. Ronald Reagan once said that you can achieve anything when you stop looking at who gets the credit and start looking at what the better good is, and that's what this is tonight. This is a collaboration of students and professors, ideas and efforts to be here,” Lybrand said. “I love how we get to experiment and come up with new recipes. We collaborate together with ideas of what type of beer everybody likes and then develop the grain bill and the hop profiles and things like that so that we come up with something unique.”

Experimentation is a key part of the brewing process. Last semester’s class brewed half a dozen beers.Some did not work out as planned, while others may be produced in the future under the Spur City label.

The students involved understand the value of the extraordinary opportunity to be in on the beginning of something like the launch of Spur City.

“Spur City was created by students,” says senior hospitality management major Olivia Mitchell, part of the student team that made it happen.. “Those students will share it with their classmates and family members. It brings a community because we decided to base the name on what we connect to: USC.”

The launch is the culmination of three semesters of innovation, collaboration, and hands-on learning, and the beginning of something big . . . and cold and tasty.