Lexington will be able to add another local brewery to its list by the end of the summer.

Mirror Twining Brewing Company, located at 725 National Ave. and will join businesses on the Warehouse Block. Their expected opening date is late July, early August.

Derek DeFranco is one of the company’s partners and brewmaster. Since he graduated from law school in 2013, DeFranco moved to Lexington and took an interest in brewing.

“I started getting into brewing at home and I was fortunate enough to get a brewing position at Alltech (Brewery), and I did that for about a year,” DeFranco said. He wanted to eventually open his own brewery but needed experience in the field first.

DeFranco said about two years ago, he and Ryan Reed, another of the company’s partners, had mutual friends and talked over dinner about DeFranco wanted to open a brewery. DeFranco said Reed had interest since. The two then began writing a business plan.

Once the plan was finished, DeFranco said they began to look for money to fund the idea and came into contact with now partner Dave Long, who wanted to get involved with Mirror Twin.

DeFranco has been friends with another partner, Michael Sobolak, since college. Sobolak came to Lexington for DeFranco’s wedding, and they began talking about DeFranco opening a brewing company. Sobolak tasted beer DeFranco had brewed for the occasion and that is when Sobolak came on board, DeFranco said.

DeFranco said the process of opening took awhile because of research. He said partners visited other local breweries for advice, looked for investors and had to make sure the business would profit.

To offset some costs, Mirror Twin held a Kickstarter so those in the community could feel like they were apart of the business. Mirror Twin slightly surpassed their goal of $15,000. The campaign’s video has 60,000 views and was made by Beard House Media.

“We did our video, and prior to that we probably reached out to 15 or 20 individuals personally that we know, friends and family, kind of let them know what we were doing and sort of lined up some donors to speak with and really we just blanketed it with social media to try and get the word out there locally and we were able to pick up a pretty good following,” Reed said.

As for creating the company’s name, DeFranco is a “mirror twin,” meaning he is the mirror image of his identical twin brother. DeFranco is right-handed while his brother is left-handed and they have opposite personalities. DeFranco also said the term will apply to Mirror Twin’s beers.

“We’re going to do something kind of unique where we’re going to have what we call ‘twin drafts’ or ‘twin beers,’ where we’re going to have two beers with identical recipes but we change one ingredient,” DeFranco said.

DeFranco said the twin beers will be served side-by-side, or individually.

Reed said the taproom will be almost 2,000 square feet, which is larger than most of Lexington’s other breweries. The construction is still underway.

Mirror Twin has not set any definite dates yet, but they plan on have a pre-launch party before officially opening, so their staff can be trained and to work out any issues beforehand. Mirror Twin attended the last Warehouse Block Party and will also be present at future parties.

Reed said Mirror Twin will try to stay as local as possible and source most of its ingredients locally. Many furnishings inside Mirror Twin’s location will have Kentucky elements.

“First and foremost, I think that a reason the craft beer movement has become so strong and has lasted as long as it has is because there’s a real sense in the country and especially in Kentucky the sense of community, the sense of needing to support local businesses above all else,” DeFranco said. “We want to give back to that idea.”