Most places try to be one thing and do it well. Chad and Nellie Montgomery looked at that idea and went a different direction. Civil Pour at 8061 Walnut Hill Lane in Dallas is a specialty coffee shop and a 25-tap rotating craft beer bar in the same room, and the combination works better than it has any right to. It is the kind of place you go in for a morning pour-over and end up back at on a Thursday evening for a beer you have never heard of. Most regulars have done exactly that.

The Montgomerys did not stumble into this concept. Chad spent years organizing craft beer festivals in Texas, most notably the Big Texas Beer Fest, which he and Nellie built into the largest beer festival in the state. After years of running seasonal events they wanted something permanent — a year-round home for everything they had been learning about beer and coffee. They opened Civil Pour in 2018 at The Hill, the mixed-use development on the northeast corner of Walnut Hill Lane and Central Expressway, and the neighborhood took to it fast. A second location is now opening in Richardson at 800 N. Coit Road in the Promenade North Plaza, with Chad targeting summer for the opening.

The coffee program is where most people start. Civil Pour runs light to medium roasted beans specifically to let the origin of the coffee come through rather than masking it with a heavy roast. They rotate roasters regularly and feature single-origin offerings alongside their blends. The water runs through seven stages of filtration before it touches the coffee, which sounds obsessive until you taste the difference. The signature drink is the Warlock — a house latte built with chocolate, housemade vanilla, Vietnamese cinnamon, and a pinch of cayenne. It is the drink that turns people into regulars. The new housemade vanilla cold foam, now available for $1.25 on any iced drink, is the current thing worth adding.

The beer program runs 25 taps, most of them rotating. The selection is hand-picked — rare finds, seasonal releases, best-in-style examples from Texas breweries and beyond. The gas blend is 70/30 CO2 to nitrogen, which gives every pour a smoother, creamier body than the CO2-only system most bars run. The tap lines get cleaned every three weeks using a method Civil Pour describes as eighty times more effective than standard cleaning — the kind of detail that sounds like marketing until you have had a pint somewhere with dirty lines and understand why it matters. You can take anything on the wall home in a growler or a crowler, which turns a casual Thursday afternoon into a much better Friday morning.

The food is an afterthought in name only. Civil Pour’s best-known sandwich is the Cuban, built with Pecan Lodge pulled pork, and it is the best thing on the menu by a significant margin. Pecan Lodge is one of the best barbecue operations in Dallas — having their pulled pork in a Cuban sandwich at a coffee and beer bar is exactly the kind of combination that makes no sense on paper and works completely in practice. The paninis come out of a proper sandwich press, the bread is sourced locally, and the pastries rotate through local bakery partners. This is not afterthought food. It is the food of people who cared about it.

The room itself is mid-century modern in design — clean lines, warm materials, indoor and outdoor seating, enough outlets and table space that it functions as a legitimate work spot during the day without feeling like a co-working space pretending to be a cafe. It is equally comfortable at 8 a.m. with a pour-over and a laptop as it is at 6 p.m. with a pint of something rare from a Texas brewery you have been meaning to try. That range is not easy to pull off. Civil Pour manages it because the Montgomerys designed it that way from the start.

The Walnut Hill location is open Monday through Saturday 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Sunday 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. The Richardson location at 800 N. Coit Road is expected to open this summer. More at civilpour.com and on Instagram at @civilpourtx.

Similar