Drive past 3800 Loop 340 today and you'll see a building that has been sitting there, mostly finished, for well over a year. The frame went up in the spring of 2024. The concrete cured months before that. And still, as of this summer, the doors haven't opened.
Most people driving by still call it Bare Arms Brewing, because that's the name that made headlines when Waco's oldest working brewery announced it was pulling up stakes and moving six miles south into Robinson. But if you check the business's own site today, the name on the door is different. It's called Six Oaks, Texas Kitchen and Brewery. The site says plainly that the new location grew out of "our Bare Arms roots," which is another way of saying the brewery didn't just relocate. It became something else, on its way into this city, and most of the coverage of the delay hasn't caught up to that fact yet.
That's the real story here, and it's worth more attention than the average "new brewery coming soon" post, because the delay itself tells you something true about where Robinson is right now: a place absorbing more growth than its own permitting process can currently process.
From La Salle Avenue to Loop 340
Bare Arms opened in 2015 off the traffic circle on La Salle Avenue in Waco and became a fixture, voted number one by Locals Love Us and the Waco Tribune-Herald's HOT Reader's Choice Awards year after year. Kevin Yackley and his wife, Jill King, bought the brewery in January 2020, right before the pandemic hit, and kept it going in a building that had been standing since the 1960s.
By 2024 they'd outgrown it. That's when Jimmy Banks of the Triliji Group, the developer behind The Heights in Robinson, made his pitch. Banks had 27 acres on Loop 340 at Highway 6 and Old Robinson Road that he'd been building out as a mixed-use development, and he needed a restaurant and brewery component to round out what was already there: Encompass Health Rehabilitation Hospital, some retail, some office space. Yackley, who lives in Robinson himself, saw the opportunity to build the brewery he actually wanted from scratch, air-conditioned brewhouse and all, rather than keep patching an aging building.
The announcement came in September 2024. The target was a six-month build and an opening just after the first of the year, meaning January 2025.
Where the Timeline Actually Went
That target has slipped by more than a year, and the reason isn't a construction problem. It's a paperwork problem.
Concrete was poured in April 2024. The frame went up weeks later. Then the project sat, waiting on permits, from June 2024 onward. The brewery got its site plan permit right before the 2025 holidays, nearly a year after applying. The city approved interior buildout plans in early December 2025, the brewery submitted its interior plans for review, and the city sent back requested corrections on December 22. By January 29, 2026, when KWTX reported on the delay, five weeks had passed with no revisions returned, and nobody on the construction side could move until they were.
Robinson Mayor Greg May defended the city's process in that report, pointing to the successful Amazon and Walmart projects as proof that Robinson works with businesses rather than against them. Yackley's response, on the record, was simpler: "We've never given up, we've never slowed down, and we're gonna be here and reopen as quickly as the powers that be will allow it."
The owners were targeting late spring or summer 2026 as of that January update. We're squarely inside that window now. If you've been checking the parking lot on your own drives past Loop 340, you already know more about the current status than any single article can tell you, and that's exactly the kind of thing worth keeping an eye on rather than assuming settled.
What You're Actually Waiting For
Whatever the exact reopening date turns out to be, the plans on file describe something bigger than the old La Salle Avenue spot ever was:
- A 50-by-50-foot dining room built around a tank wall, so the brewing equipment is visible from your table rather than hidden in the back
- A test brewery for smaller batches and one-off recipes
- A covered patio
- A three-acre beer garden with walking trails and outdoor games, canopied by live oaks and other Texas trees
That last detail is where the new name makes sense. Six Oaks isn't a rebrand for marketing's sake. It describes the actual site: a beer garden built under a stand of oak trees, big enough to wander rather than just sit in.
The Heights Is Bigger Than One Building
Six Oaks sits inside The Heights, and The Heights has been building toward this moment for years. The site's first tenant was Encompass Health Rehabilitation Hospital, which opened as the anchor for what Triliji Group always intended as a full mixed-use development: offices, retail, a hotel and conference center still in the pipeline, and, as Jimmy Banks put it when the brewery deal was announced, the one piece that had been missing. "One thing we needed to complete a nice mixed-use development is the restaurant component," he told KXXV back when the deal was first announced.
The Heights sits inside a McLennan County tax increment reinvestment zone, a designation that channels a share of new tax revenue from development along Interstate 35, Loop 340, and Highway 77 back into public improvements and business incentives within that zone. It's a structural reason Robinson has been able to attract this pace of investment along that corridor in the first place.
The Rest of the Growth Isn't Waiting on Permits
While one brewery works through the city's process, other Robinson projects have moved on their own timelines entirely.
Walmart opened its third company-owned milk processing facility in Robinson on April 29, 2026, a more than 300,000-square-foot plant representing over $350 million in investment and more than 400 new jobs. The plant sources milk directly from Texas dairy farmers and will supply more than 650 Walmart stores and Sam's Clubs across the South Central United States, all bottled a few miles from where residents are still waiting on their brewery to reopen.
Amazon is building a roughly 119,000-square-foot delivery station along John Bowden Parkway in the Robinson Business Park, its second physical site in the Greater Waco area, following the robotic fulfillment center it opened in McLennan County back in 2022.
And this summer, TxDOT began repaving Highway 77 from Waco's traffic circle to Moonlight Drive, work that started in July 2026 and includes replacing box culverts along Old Robinson Road, a project separate from anything happening at The Heights but part of the same wave of infrastructure catching up to demand along that corridor.
None of this is subtle. A city that used to be described as a sleepy bedroom community south of Waco is processing three major projects at once along the same handful of roads, and one of them happens to be the beer garden its residents have been waiting a year and a half for.
What's Already Open While You Wait
None of this means Robinson has been short on places to eat in the meantime. Rocket Café, tucked near City Hall, has been serving chicken fried steak and hearty breakfast plates to regulars for years. Launch Pad Espresso and Bakery on Robinson Drive opens at 5:30 in the morning and has built a following for its white chocolate mocha and its "Best Friend" sandwich. La Cocina Tex-Mex Grill and Tejun The Texas Cajun both draw steady lunch crowds, and Bush's Chicken has become enough of a daily habit for enough people that it barely registers as a chain anymore around here.
If Six Oaks opens this summer as planned, it won't be filling a void so much as adding a new kind of gathering spot to a food scene that was already working. What it will do is give Robinson its first real beer garden, something the city hasn't had, and a physical answer to the mayor's own claim that Robinson is no longer the sleepy rural town it used to be.
The permit process has been slow. The growth around it hasn't been.
Whether you're watching the parking lot at Loop 340 for the first sign of an opening date, or just curious about what else is changing along the roads you drive every day, that's the kind of local detail our team at Jorgenson Real Estate tracks as a matter of course. If you have questions about what's happening in your part of Robinson, or anywhere else in Central Texas, reach out and we'll walk you through what we're seeing.
