Thieves Guild Cidery, themed around fantasy and magic, wants to be Utah’s first ‘experience’ bar

At Thieves Guild Cidery on a recent Friday night, the new fantasy-themed bar was as bustling and inviting as the tavern that might greet a group of adventurers after a long day of fighting monsters.

Beneath a ceiling glowing with dozens of lanterns, people filled Thieves Guild’s many tables, sipping glasses of cider and chatting. In one of the deep booths along the windows, sectioned off by dark red velvet curtains, a group played a board game by candlelight as darkness fell outside.

The masterminds behind this cozy scene are Thieves Guild Cidery co-founders and co-owners Maxwel Knudsen and Jordy Kirkman. Wanting to create a “medieval fantasy tavern,” the pair adorned their cidery with skulls, sconces, LED candles, tapestries and weaponry, in a style that Knudsen calls “chaotic wizard maximalism.” Even the handle on the front door is a brass dagger.

It all started out as a home-brewing project in steel buckets, but it has become a legitimate cider- and mead-making operation, almost ready to serve the denizens of Salt Lake City.

And there’s magic to be discovered everywhere. Knudsen said he and Kirkman want Thieves Guild Cidery to be Utah’s first “experience” bar, “so that customers feel like they’re more than just coming in and getting a drink and enjoying the atmosphere.” They can be witches or wizards themselves, he said.

Forming the guild

Years before they opened their bar at 117 W. 900 South in the Central Ninth neighborhood, Knudsen and Kirkman met at Quarters in downtown Salt Lake City. Knudsen was working at the arcade bar, where he ran a Killer Queen league, which Kirkman belonged to. (Killer Queen is a strategy-driven arcade game where 10 people play at once, in two teams of five.)

After the two of them struck up a friendship, Kirkman started teaching Knudsen how to home brew. Altogether, Kirkman has been making cider for about 12 years. He started out pressing apples at his parents’ small orchard in Cache Valley, and at his longtime friend’s orchard in Bainbridge Island, outside of Seattle.

Eventually, in 2020, Knudsen and Kirkman got to the point where they had brewed about 300 gallons of beer and cider, and they were giving it away to their pandemic “pod” while everything was shut down. They realized they both enjoyed brewing, and “I think we actually got really good at it,” Kirkman said.

After COVID-19, Knudsen and Kirkman were both working in tech jobs, but Knudsen said he found he hated working behind a desk. Up late one night, they started joking about leaving tech and starting a bar together, what with Knudsen’s decade of experience in the food and beverage industry, and Kirkman’s brewing know-how.

They already had the seed of what would become Thieves Guild in their minds, and “we kind of said yes,” Knudsen said.

The two of them knew they wanted to start a cidery, specifically, but they also wanted it to be a place that spoke to their interest in games like Dungeons & Dragons and Skyrim, and “The Lord of the Rings” books and films. Being “big fantasy nerds,” Knudsen said, they decided to create a tavern that would be a fitting place to unwind with a glass of cider or mead, one influenced by magical realms.

‘A crazy journey’

To make it all happen, though, Knudsen and Kirkman faced an uphill battle. “It’s been a crazy journey,” Knudsen said. “This is our first business, right? So we are sort of learning everything as we go.”

A couple of years before they found their current location inside a former AlphaGraphics, they had actually started to develop a different location down the street. They signed a lease, moved in, and started getting everything set up before discovering the situation was untenable.

While they had gotten the go-ahead from the city, Knudsen and Kirkman didn’t learn until after they moved in that the building owner had changed the zoning for the building from manufacturing to mixed residential use.

The change “basically ruined our business plan,” said Kirkman, and set them back about six months.

Luckily, they found their permanent location relatively quickly, and got to work. It took about three months for them to get all their building permits, Knudsen said, then they demolished the interior of the building to form an empty shell. They had to dig trenches to install the proper drainage, and install a new roof.

They also had to do a seismic upgrade on the building, and it took a long six months to find an inspector who could sign off on the work.

Knudsen and Kirkman originally had plans to open Thieves Guild Cidery in the spring, but that got pushed to the fall due to construction delays, and the bar ended up opening just in time for Halloween.

The name Thieves Guild comes from a common trope in the world of fantasy. Inside the worlds of Skyrim, D&D and tabletop games, the thieves guild is “where your heroes and adventurers go at the end of a quest to relax and hang out and discover the secrets of the town or find out about new places they should adventure to,” Knudsen said.

Creating the magic

From the wooden tables to the lanterns on the ceiling, there isn’t much inside Thieves Guild Cidery that Knudsen or Kirkman didn’t make or at least have a hand in creating.

Knudsen said their individual skills complement one another. “I can build a tavern,” he said. “I generally have some construction skills, but Jordy has skills to make it magic.”

Knudsen described the two of them as “makers”: They 3D-printed all of the decorative sconces and skulls, and they hand-molded the wax that covers the LED lights in the candleholders. They did all the stonework for the “waterplace” feature, which, unlike a traditional fireplace, directs water vapor to move like fire and is backlit with more LED lights.

With its individually stylized restrooms (one is themed like the Ministry of Magic in the “Harry Potter” films), many fantasy artifacts and lush woodwork, Thieves Guild Cidery is already an immersive experience. Each LED lantern on the ceiling can even be controlled individually via an app on Kirkman’s phone, allowing him to change the color of the lights, make them flicker, or have them all go out at once.

But “this is level one, for sure,” Knudsen said. “And then as the weeks go on, we’ll gain experience and add new features.”

Eventually, all of the skulls will glow eerily, and even more mysterious objects will appear in the shelves around the booths.

Knudsen and Kirkman are also working with a local bookbinder to make a custom leather-bound spellbook for the bar that will include a list of spells that patrons will be able to come up and “cast.”

Working again with the individually controlled lights, “we can design spells,” Knudsen said, “so if we want to, we can cast like Fireball and have all the lights on that side of the bar charge up, and then you can watch it fly across the bar through the lights, then hit something and explode.”

They also have plans for all sorts of discoverable tricks and secrets yet to be revealed.

But most importantly, they wanted the space to be somewhere people would want to stay awhile, “making the place cozy enough where you can post up and actually play a long-form tabletop game,” Kirkman said.

Potions and elixirs

On the beverage menu at Thieves Guild Cidery are several cocktails, called “elixirs,” worthy of an adventuring party.

Tyler Fernberg, the bar’s “potion master,” works with Kirkman to design Thieves Guild’s unique cocktails. New offerings include Burning Hands, which features whiskey, honey, black currant, cinnamon and apple reduction. There’s also Dragon’s Blood, made with black cherry and dragonfruit cider.

Thieves Guild doesn’t plan to serve its own ciders and meads until it gets official approval from the Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverages Services later this month, Knudsen said. But once that goes through, he and Kirkman plan to have available Dark Portal (a cider made with black currant and cherry), Prancing Pony (a crisp and “sessionable” cider), Stone Giant (a cider made with apricots and sour cherries), the mead Blood Gem Tiger Sword, and tentatively an as-yet-unnamed root beer mead.

Kirkman has plans to make sparkling session meads, as well as ciders that are unfiltered to preserve the delicate flavors of Utah’s apples, he said. He and Knudsen want to experiment with ciders and try different recipes, so the cider selection will rotate based on what’s in season “or whatever we think was cool to make at the time,” Kirkman said.

For the moment, Thieves Guild is offering ciders from Second Summit Cider Co. on tap.