If you drive Loop 340 near Old Robinson Road, you've watched the same graded lot for close to two years, waiting for the same sign to go up. Most of Robinson has been calling it Bare Arms Brewing since the announcement first hit local news in September 2024. That name is no longer the one on the building.
The project is still coming. It just isn't coming as Bare Arms.
Two Years of Watching One Lot on Loop 340
Bare Arms Brewing built its reputation on La Salle Avenue in Waco, where owners Kevin Yackley and Jill King had run the operation since buying it from its original owners in January 2020, right before the pandemic hit. It had been open since 2015 and carried the distinction of being Waco's oldest continuously operating brewery. By 2024 the couple had outgrown the building, which dated back to the 1960s, and started looking for a place to build from scratch.
That search ended in Robinson. In September 2024, Yackley and King announced a move to a new construction project inside The Heights Garden development, a 27-acre mixed-use site on the south side of Highway 6 between Old Robinson Road and Highway 77. The project paired the brewery owners with Triliji Group, the development team behind Legends Crossing in Waco, and Dwell Construction, a Houston-based builder with three decades in restaurant and retail work. The plan called for a 10,000-square-foot building with an air-conditioned brewhouse, a commercial kitchen, indoor and outdoor seating, and an extensive beer garden. Yackley, a Robinson resident himself, talked at the time about bringing his craft to his own town.
The build was supposed to take about six months, putting the opening somewhere around the start of 2025.
That timeline didn't hold.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| September 2024 | Bare Arms Brewing announces its move from Waco to a new 10,000-square-foot build in Robinson's Heights Garden development |
| Original target | Owners expect a roughly six-month build, aiming for an early 2025 opening |
| January 2026 | KWTX reports the location is still closed more than a year after groundbreaking, with permit delays cited as the main obstacle |
| Late 2025 | Owners say they finally receive their site plan permit after what King described as a nearly year-long wait |
| September 2026 | The project's own website now introduces itself under a different name, still describing the opening as months away |
By late January 2026, the brewery was still closed and the owners were public about their frustration. Robinson's mayor at the time, Greg May, defended the city's permitting process in a statement to KWTX, pointing to Amazon's $40 million project completed in 364 days and Walmart's milk plant opening after 18 months as evidence the city moves fast when plans are in order. Yackley's response was more direct: he said the team had never given up and would reopen as soon as the permitting allowed it.
What the Site Calls Itself Now
Here's what most of the coverage on this project hasn't caught up to. The business's own website, sixoakswaco.com, no longer introduces itself as Bare Arms Brewing. It introduces itself as Six Oaks Texas Kitchen and Brewery.
The site is upfront about the lineage. It describes itself as the future home of Six Oaks, formerly Bare Arms Brewing, and says the new location will proudly serve Bare Arms beer exclusively. The description matches the original plan almost exactly: a scratch kitchen, a restaurant, and a brewery built around a 3-acre beer garden canopied by oaks and other Texas trees, sitting right where the earlier reporting placed it, at Highway 6 and Old Robinson Road.
What hasn't changed is the timeline problem. As of this writing, the site still describes itself as a future home and says the full experience is coming in the months ahead. Two years after the original announcement, the project that Robinson has been watching from the road still doesn't have a hard open date, and it no longer carries the name most residents expect to see on the sign.
The Two Parks Already Doing the Work
While that corner of town keeps waiting, the rest of Robinson hasn't been standing still. Two city parks have quietly been carrying the weight of weekend life without needing a brewery to anchor them.
Peplow Park is the one built for structured activity. The city's own facilities page describes a pavilion, a playground, sand volleyball, a basketball court, a gazebo, an amphitheater, exercise equipment, horseshoe pits, and a walking and jogging trail, all shaded by live oak and red oak trees with lighting set up for nighttime use. It's the kind of park built for a Saturday tournament or an evening walk after dinner, not a quick stop.
Robinson City Park does something different. It's built around a lake that supports fishing, boating, and swimming, with a splash pad for kids in the summer months and a disc golf course and dog park for everyone else. A Veteran's Memorial sits inside the park grounds, and the pavilion can be rented out for private events. The park itself dates back to a Works Progress Administration project built during the Great Depression, which makes it one of the older recreational spaces in the city, not a recent addition built to keep pace with growth.
Neither park needed a brewery to become a gathering place. Both were already doing that work before ground was ever broken on Loop 340.
The Food Already in Place
The same is true for where people actually eat. Tejun The Texas Cajun sits at 711 N Robinson Dr and has built a local following around its outdoor setup as much as its menu. The restaurant offers a main dining room and back porch dining with televisions, but the detail that keeps coming up in reviews is the outdoor covered pavilion seating built over a fish pond, where guests can feed the fish before or after their meal. It's the kind of feature that turns a seafood dinner into a family outing.
A few blocks over, one longtime customer reviewing a Robinson lunch counter noted the restaurant has been serving the city since 1961, decades before any of the current development conversations started. That kind of longevity says something about a town that people describe, often inaccurately, as new or still forming. Papa Jacks BBQ has built its own following the same way, with reviewers consistently pointing to the brisket and pulled pork, including at least one visitor who said it was the best barbecue they'd found on a trip through Texas.
None of these places are waiting on a beer garden to open before they matter to the people who already live here. They're the reason a Friday night in Robinson doesn't feel empty in the meantime.
What This Actually Means for the Corner on Loop 340
When Six Oaks finally does open, it will be joining a town that already has a rhythm, not filling a void. The parks are established. The restaurants have their regulars. The lot on Loop 340 has spent two years as a landmark for delay, not for gathering, and that's likely to keep being true until there's an actual date on the door.
The more useful thing to track isn't when the beer garden opens. It's that the name on the eventual sign already changed once without most of the town noticing, and there's no guarantee it's the last change before the doors do.
Alan Hardin keeps an eye on projects like this one because they say something real about how Robinson is growing, not because a brewery opening changes anyone's address. If you're curious about a specific block, a specific development, or what's actually happening near a property you're watching in Robinson, reach out to Ten42 Realty and ask.
