Uproot Todo Mal — The Lager Outlived the Taproom

Here’s a Birmingham beer story with an unusual ending: the brewery closed and the beer got harder to avoid. Uproot Brewing shut the doors on its 3rd Avenue South taproom in July 2025 — the same storied address that launched Cahaba and housed Ghost Train — and instead of disappearing, founder Nate Darnell did the pragmatic thing. He turned Uproot into a brewing company. No taproom, no kitchen, no trivia night. Just beer, contract-brewed and shipped out to draft lists all over town.

And the beer worth following is Todo Mal, his Mexican-style lager. Darnell spent over a decade brewing for Good People, Avondale, and Ferus before hanging his own shingle, and from day one Uproot made a very loud, very unfashionable bet on lager while everyone else was chasing haze. Todo Mal is that bet distilled: 4.8%, corn-kissed, brilliantly clear, with a finish so clean it borders on smug.

There is nowhere to hide in a Mexican lager. No fruit puree, no triple dry-hop, no adjuncts to paper over sloppy fermentation. It’s just water, malt, corn, and technique — and Todo Mal has technique for days. Soft cracker malt up front, the faintest sweetness from the corn, a whisper of noble hop, and then it’s gone, politely asking if you’d like another. On a 95-degree Alabama afternoon, the answer is yes. The answer is always yes.

Brewery: Uproot Brewing — Birmingham, AL

Style: Mexican-Style Lager

ABV: 4.8%

Rating: ★★★★

Is losing the taproom sad? Sure. That room had live music, house-smoked tacos, and one of the friendliest patios in the city. But breweries close in Birmingham with depressing regularity, and their beers almost always die with them. Todo Mal didn’t. It’s still on draft at Leroy, still stocked at Hop City, still quietly outclassing every macro Mexican lager it shares a cooler with. The taproom was temporary. The recipe, apparently, is not.

Verdict: the best kind of survivor. If you see Todo Mal on a draft list, order it, raise it to the old 3rd Avenue space — now a coffee shop, because of course it is — and be glad some brewers are too stubborn to quit.