A Brewery, Some Silos, and a Few Good Ideas
Step onto the grounds of TUPPS Brewery at 402 E. Louisiana Street and you will notice something unusual standing beside the brewing facility: a cluster of cylindrical grain silos, each one converted into a small retail shop. The structures that once stored agricultural product now hold a cigar roller, a syrup maker, a lavender boutique, and a plant shop — four distinct businesses operating under one unusual roof on McKinney’s east side.
This is the Silos at TUPPS Brewery, an ongoing project built around the brewery’s Build-Your-Own-Business program. The concept is straightforward enough: give small-business owners a physical foothold inside an existing destination and let the foot traffic do some of the early work. For the businesses that signed on, the bet was that a craft brewery with a loyal customer base would be a reasonable place to introduce a new idea to the public.
Who Is Inside
The tenant list covers some genuinely different territory.
Rolling Cigars brings a hands-on element to the mix. The name is self-explanatory — cigars rolled on site, the kind of specialty retail that tends to draw repeat visitors once someone discovers it.
Toasted Simple produces small-batch cocktail syrups. The product category is one that has found a steady audience in recent years, as home bartending has grown beyond a pandemic-era hobby into a more permanent interest for a lot of households. Having a local producer available in person, rather than through a shipping box, is a different kind of shopping experience.
Fields of Fidelis is a veteran-owned lavender boutique. The name suggests the connection between the owner’s background and the business they chose to build — fidelis, faithful, is a word with obvious military resonance. The lavender boutique format, with its range of products derived from a single plant, tends to appeal to shoppers looking for something more considered than a generic gift shop.
Peridot Plant Co. rounds out the group with botanical gifts and terrariums. It is the kind of shop that works well in a walkable, social environment, where someone can pick up a small terrarium on impulse after a beer or bring a friend specifically because the destination offers more than one reason to visit.
Why East McKinney
The brewery’s address puts it in a part of McKinney that has drawn attention as the city’s older industrial corridors have been reconsidered for new uses. The east side of downtown McKinney and the streets immediately adjacent have seen a mix of renovation projects and new tenants over the past several years, and TUPPS has been a consistent anchor in that stretch.
For a small-business owner, the calculus of opening inside an established venue is different from signing a lease on a standalone storefront. The overhead is structured differently, the built-in audience is real from day one, and the risk of opening in an undiscovered location is reduced. The tradeoff is that the business becomes part of someone else’s ecosystem, at least at the start.
TUPPS’s program formalizes that arrangement in a way that gives the small businesses their own physical space — their own silo, essentially — rather than folding them into a shared market booth or a corner of the taproom. The grain silo form is unusual enough that it functions as a draw on its own. People who come to photograph the structure end up noticing the shops. People who come for the shops end up staying for a beer.
Coming by This Summer
The Silos are open to visitors on an ongoing basis, making the location a reasonable addition to a Saturday or Friday evening in east McKinney. The brewery itself hosts a recurring Friday evening event called Hops and Shops, scheduled next for July 24 from 6 to 9 p.m., which brings local vendors into the mix alongside the permanent Silos tenants. The combination of a market atmosphere and a working brewery makes the east Louisiana Street address a layered stop rather than a single-purpose errand.
For anyone who has watched McKinney’s older industrial blocks evolve over the past decade, the Silos represent one version of how that evolution can go — adaptive reuse that keeps the physical history of a place visible while adding something new inside it. The silos still look like silos. They just happen to have a terrarium and a lavender candle inside now.
Visitors can find the Silos at TUPPS Brewery at 402 E. Louisiana Street. Hours vary by tenant; checking the brewery’s website before a visit is the safest approach for confirming what is open on a given day.