SOUTH DEERFIELD — Element Brewing & Distilling will celebrate the launch of its new location, Element², at the former home of the Giving Circle Thrift Shop at 3 Sugarloaf St. with a grand opening on Saturday.

The pub will be open from 1 to 9 p.m. on June 20, with musical acts Vimana performing from 2 to 4 p.m. and Bekka Dowland from 7 to 9 p.m.

The celebration will mark nearly a year since co-owners Dan Kramer and Ben Anhalt signed the lease for the building last July.

According to the pair, the soft launch of the new location on May 29 did not have the smoothest landing. After encountering an issue with one of the seven permits required for the owners to run the brewery, Kramer and Anhalt only served cider and cocktails during the first week. Instead of their signature brews, the first drink Anhalt poured in South Deerfield was an old fashioned.

“For me, it was a little bit bittersweet because we couldn’t pour beer, and people were coming in asking for beer,” Kramer recounted, sitting with Anhalt at a table in the company’s home base in Millers Falls. “We’re a brewery first.”

When the pair served the first beer a week later on June 5, “It felt like we finally hit the finish line,” Kramer said — or at least it did for a couple days.

“Then, the air conditioner died for the whole building,” Kramer added with a straight face.

Keeping the new pub at a cool temperature proved to be a difficult task in a building that housed a bank before the thrift store, with permanently shut windows and thick walls.

After fixes to the air conditioner last week, Kramer and Anhalt think the brewery is finally complete.

“Knock on copper, we should be in good shape,” Kramer said, tapping the copper table.

For the new place, the pair shopped at an atypical store — the now closed Kennametal manufacturing plant in Greenfield. They stuffed their van with “every single piece of this place we could get,” Anhalt recounted.

After several pounds of cat litter to soak up the oil and rounds of pressure-washing, the pair converted work benches into the bar that snakes through the new space. For Anhalt, the indents along the bar’s edge from the wrists of the Kennametal manufacturers as they worked adds “so much character” to the centerpiece of the pub’s open layout.

“It seems like the aesthetic for a long time has been sterile — you either have the Apple Store — clean lines, high contrast — or you have the boutique vintage that just is a little too clean, it’s not lived in,” Anhalt said. “But this, even though it’s all new, it feels not brand new.”

Hints of the building’s past lives collide with its new purpose, including the bank vault that now serves as Element²’s liquor store and the teller window that the owners hope to transform into a drive-thru later on.

Traces of Element Brewing & Distilling’s slogan, “Art, Science, Beer,” also fill the pub, from the posters that Anhalt’s father, a science teacher in the 1970s, once hung in his classroom, to the metabolic pathway of alcohol printed alongside the bar and the light bulbs buzzing in beakers.

“We didn’t want a dark, dingy bar. We wanted a warm, inviting space,” Kramer said.

Paint, in a shade called “Laser Lemon,” colors the ceiling and bathroom, where visitors look up at the faces of celebrities on posters with messages like, “Christopher Walken is watching you pee.”

“We try not to be too serious,” Kramer said.

As small breweries face growing challenges, Kramer and Anhalt have taken the traffic of locals in the new location with limited advertising as a good sign for its future.

“The response from the town makes me pretty hopeful that it’s something that … the neighborhood is looking for,” Anhalt said.

Since its opening on May 29, the pair has seen neighbors and strangers mingle in the pub, an aspect of Element² they believe sets it apart from other businesses.

“People that go to breweries have something in common with the person next to them, because they go to breweries, too, so there’s already camaraderie,” Kramer said. “If you want to strike up a conversation with them, you already have something that you can talk about.”

Along with conversations like, “Oh, wait a minute, don’t you live next door to Jane? I went to school with your brother,” Anhalt recalled overhearing an interaction between an Australian tourist and a crew of locals from behind the bar.

“The next thing you knew they were trading stories about traveling to this place and that,” Anhalt said. “They didn’t know each other, but they knew each other on the way out.”

The South Deerfield location is open on Wednesdays from 3 to 7 p.m., Thursdays and Fridays from 3 to 9 p.m., Saturdays from 1 to 9 p.m. and Sundays from 1 to 7 p.m. Element² is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.