MISQUAH — Their license granted, Annika and Jonas Holt have turned from the paperwork of opening a brewery to the plumbing of it, and now say they expect to pour the Chain’s first commercial pint sometime in August — a target they offered with the careful optimism of people who have renovated an old building before.

The building is the old Co-op creamery on Second Avenue, empty since the co-op closed in 1987, and by the Holts’ account it is finally starting to look like something. Two stainless fermenting tanks stand installed and plumbed along the tiled east wall; a bar of new wood is going up along the front; the original white subway tile has been cleaned rather than replaced, on Annika’s insistence that the room should still look like what it was. (The other creamery, the older one on Birch Street, has held this newspaper since 1897 and is going nowhere, a distinction the Holts are gently tired of drawing.)

The couple are hiring, and have posted for seasonal serving help — an advertisement that appears in this week’s classifieds, and that specifies a willingness to carry four plates or to learn. They expect to open with a short list of beers and a shorter menu, and to expand, Jonas said, “only as fast as we can do it without getting yelled at.”

The name remains, they insist, undecided, though the town has decided several on their behalf. Suggestions submitted unbidden to this office include the Creamery, the Old Co-op, the Second Avenue, and, from one correspondent, the Cultured Cow, which the Holts have promised to consider exactly as long as courtesy requires.

The taproom’s arrival has been met with what one council-watcher called broad enthusiasm “for a place to sit down with a beer that isn’t the Northern Tap, including from the Northern Tap.” Deb Pavek, of the Northern Tap, confirmed the sentiment. “We’re a bar,” she said. “They’re a brewery. People can do both. People here have been doing both for years, just farther away.”

An opening date will be announced, the Holts said, when they are certain of it, and not one day before, having learned that a printed date in this town is a promise the whole Chain will hold you to.