Toasty Bros’ taproom is informally known as “The Gallery,” as the interior walls of the heavy cinderblock construction are covered by paintings and sketches for sale by both staff and local artists. The place is a small, cozy spot transformed from a former auto garage on the edge of walkable downtown Denton, just a block away from the larger and flashier Union Bear Brewing.
The brewery is owned by Toast Tiensvold*, a tall, lanky, soft-spoken and casual man with a buzz cut and beard often dyed to match whatever holiday or event he is promoting. Sometimes he looks like he should be carrying a skateboard everywhere (or at least he would have when he was younger) and other times he looks like the goth host of a vampire dance night. Toast’s personal image is flexible, to say the least.
“I grew up on Twizzlers and Coca-Cola,” says Toast. “Thankfully, I married someone who eats pretty healthy and she likes to cook, [so] since then I eat a little more healthy, less Taco Bell. I don’t drink sodas anymore.” His business and beers are a pure reflection of him personally: artistic, free-spirited, uninterested in the greater commercialism or consumer movements that make up some parts the modern craft beer scene. Spend any time with him and you realize Toast is committed to following his own muse.
His entry into the role of local brewer is the grass-roots story of amateur turning pro with little more than experience working in the fast-food industry. “So I was on all three tiers,” says Toast. “I started in the retail tier, working at a liquor store… I ended up being the go-to craft beer guy. When they came in to sell us craft beer, I would be the one who ordered it, and then I managed the cooler and everything, and got to pick out what beers went where in the doors and all that.”
Originally from Mansfield, he moved to Denton and started working for a few local distributors, eventually upgrading to a job driving trucks at Ben E. Keith (“they paid better”). From there, Toast moved to the sales side and spent seven years as a commercial beer rep before deciding to try his hand at homebrewing around 2011. His weekend hobby quickly became his creative obsession.
“I started volunteering at different craft breweries, whatever they would let me do. I’ll mop off the floors, I’ll squeegee, clean out the mash tun, whatever. So if it gets my foot in the door, and if you could teach me things…” After years of volunteering, Whistle Post Brewing of Pilot Point (closed 2018) had an opening for Assistant Brewer, and Toast finally made the transition into the craft brewing profession “with a huge pay cut.”
Once initiated, Toast’s career grew relatively quickly. “I’d only been an Assistant Brewer there for like six months, and head brewer Blake [Morrison] left to go brew at White Rock Alehouse… I steered the ship and made it work, and that lasted for about another year before the distillery next door decided to take over the space and decided to shut it down.”
However, the itch that needed scratching persisted. “So that’s when we started first talking about opening up Toasty Bros.” It’s the same dream that every homebrewer has, taking that financial leap of faith and opening your own small business. With the support of his wife Leah (a graphic designer, affectionately referred to as “Mrs. Toast”), Tiensvold relied on her for most of the back-of-house management from bookkeeping, TTB and TABC reports, legal compliance and other paperwork. “She’s doing the less fun stuff while I get to do the actual brewing.”
The brewery officially opened as a licensed entity in January 2019, albeit only virtually. “We’d always called it Toasty Bros. Our homebrewing was Toasty Bros, Backyard Brewery.” They began contract brewing with local craft breweries while putting together plans for their own facility, working with much larger brewing and packaging equipment after hours and then selling and distributing their own product, until eventually they found their own space for a nanobrewery in the middle of Denton.
Toasty Bros Beer is a tiny brewery inside a converted auto shop (as are several local businesses surrounding downtown), a stand-alone, 1500-square-foot structure with garage-door entry along one wall that houses a three-barrel brewing system with a dedicated taproom, the exterior now covered in custom artwork. They opened their doors in February 2025 and currently have only a single employee on staff, with all three of them still working either full-time or part-time jobs elsewhere to pay the bills. However, these are early days.
The low-res, pixelated skull and skeleton have been adopted as common motifs at the brewery, appearing both in personal artwork lining the walls, the exterior public murals, and on his labels and tap handles. However, the imagery is not used in a scary, horror-film style but more of a fanciful macabre icon that gets repeated throughout the business. Toast himself is an avid fan of old video games, especially Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions (which he plays through once a year) and a late-1990s psychological horror-anime called Serial Experiments Lain, featuring the work of graphic artist Yoshitoshi Abe.
Toast’s beers reflect this creative persona, with no more than a half-dozen taps selling a random selection of styles, from a black kölsch to an American IPA brewed with corn to the Pink Paladin (a Belgian-style blonde) to whatever local collaboration is most recent. His most popular seller is the Rock Philosopher Undead Ale, a lighter riff on an amber or golden ale similar to Rogue’s Dead Guy Ale, but he claims the best he makes is the Bäkéneko Black IPA. Cold-brewed coffee, flavored hard seltzers, alcohol-free mixes and sparking water round out the tapped beverage offerings.
Toasty Bros is serious about the “be local” philosophy. Their self-distribution footprint is barely larger than Denton’s downtown, and they avidly support and cross-promote exclusively local businesses while shopping and buying from the same. Likewise, they tend to avoid most of the regional and local craft beer festivals and events (for now, at least).
On the state of the craft brewing industry in Texas today, Toast says: “I just think that the whole having a really big brewery is not a thing anymore… [this] is the way I feel like it’s been for a minute now, at least since Covid, if not before… The industry is going more towards your local neighborhood brewpub, and just more hyper-focused on local… smaller batches, smaller breweries, which is the reason, one of the reasons why we did ours the way we’re doing it…. just kind of sticking to your neighborhood.”
“When I left Ben E. Keith and I took the huge pay cut to pursue my passion of brewing beer, I was like, ‘Okay, this is what’s important,'” says Toast. “Having a really good career that will buy me a house and a car and all these things is not as important as being happy doing what I do every day. And even with that [first] job brewing, I would still tell him like, ‘Hey, man, I have to leave at a specific hour on Mondays because I throw darts.’ I’m in the dart league, Denton Area Dart Association, and that’s something that I’m passionate about and I enjoy doing, and I’m not gonna let work get in the way of that… That’s what you got to do. Wasn’t wasn’t going to allow work to get in the way of me doing what I love.” PH
* Yes, Toast is his legal name.
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