For the entire month of October, the burger bar at 19 Augusta Street is answering to a different name. Jack Brown's Beer & Burger Joint is being reborn as Beetlejoint, a month-long Beetlejuice takeover that runs from October 1 through Halloween, filling the West End space with immersive decor, specialty themed cocktails, craft beer tap takeovers, photo ops and what the bar cheerfully calls "general afterlife nonsense."
The premise is simple and a little unhinged: take a neighborhood burger joint known for cold beer and simple food, and let the ghost with the most redecorate. The walls get weird. The cocktails get names. The taps get hijacked by guest breweries. And on October 31, the whole thing blows out with a Halloween party featuring a costume contest, prizes, specialty cocktails, cold beer and dancing on the patio. The bar's own pitch is refreshingly blunt: "Come dressed to kill. Stay for a burger. Have a few beers. Make some choices your living self can deal with tomorrow."
It is the kind of stunt that only works if the place underneath it has a real identity to bend. Jack Brown's does. The chain traces back to 2009 in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where two childhood friends finally acted on a dream they had been kicking around since they were kids. Growing up in Alexandria, the pair bonded over skateboarding and an unlikely shared obsession: collecting beer cans. As ten-year-olds they dug through trash bins and begged their fathers to bring back exotic brands from business trips. That original collection now sits on high shelves running around the bar of the Harrisonburg location, after spending nearly two decades boxed up in their parents' attics.
The long road to opening night ran through very different careers. Ludwig went to Radford University and opened a ski and snowboard shop, Function 4 Sports, in Harrisonburg, while also brewing his own beer. Sabin moved to Miami and worked his way up from dishwasher to executive chef, then returned to Virginia to cook as a sous chef under Patrick O'Connell at the Inn at Little Washington. The two reconnected when Ludwig called his old friend to vent about a bad day at work, and the conversation drifted to the bar they had always talked about opening. Ludwig knew business and beer; Sabin knew restaurants. Less than a year later, Jack Brown's existed.
What they built was deliberately small and specific. The burgers are 100 percent American Wagyu beef, and they are served without lettuce and tomato, on the theory that the beef and the toppings should carry the flavor. The menu leans on playful specials with pop-culture names, and the beer list runs past 100 craft selections. The culture is summed up in a single house rule: "Treat people like they're in your basement bar."
That formula has traveled. After Virginia locations in Roanoke, Elkton, Charlottesville and Richmond, the brand pushed beyond Virginia. The first South Carolina outpost was announced for 711 Harden Street in Columbia's Five Points in 2021, and the Greenville location opened in the West End of downtown, joining a stretch of Augusta Street that has become one of the city's denser eating-and-drinking corridors.
Which brings things back to October. A themed takeover is a bet that regulars will forgive a bar for getting strange, and that newcomers will wander in out of curiosity. Beetlejoint leans into that bargain with a full month of programming rather than a single night: decor that changes the room, cocktails built for the season, tap takeovers that give the beer list a temporary personality, and photo ops for people who want proof they were there. It costs nothing to walk in during normal business hours, which makes it an unusually low-commitment Halloween attraction in a city that fills up fast in October.
The Halloween-night finale is where the month pays off. A costume contest, prizes, dancing on the patio and a bar full of people who have spent four weeks marinating in the same joke is a recipe for the kind of night that gets retold badly the next morning. The source material has proven durable enough to justify the effort. Tim Burton's original Beetlejuice arrived in 1988 and became a gothic comedy touchstone, and a 2024 sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, brought the character back to theaters, refreshing the franchise for an audience that now includes people who were not alive for the first film.
For Jack Brown's, the takeover is also a small act of brand confidence. A chain that has expanded carefully across the Southeast, built on a fixed menu and a basement-bar ethos, is letting one of its rooms get genuinely weird for a month. The beer stays cold, the burgers stay simple, and the dead, as the bar puts it, stay restless. Beetlejoint runs October 1 through 31 at 19 Augusta Street, with the Halloween party and costume contest closing it out on the 31st.