Emily Yeager, Kansas City’s only professional female brewer, does a little bit of everything

Emily Yeager has already taken two unintentional beer showers today at McCoy’s Public House. Those things happen to new brewers. That’s one reason she’s wearing rubber boots.

On this mid-December afternoon, Yeager, the newest addition to the brewhouse at McCoy’s and Kansas City’s only professionally employed female brewer for the moment, is a week away from the release of the first beer that she has helped make. It’s also the most anticipated McCoy’s beer release of 2014: Ursa Major Russian imperial stout.

“I have a really strong attachment to the Ursa,” Yeager says on a break. “I can’t wait until it taps.”

Neither could the rest of the city. On December 23, bottles of Ursa Major went on sale at 4 p.m. Less than a half-hour later, they were all gone.

Yeager and the rest of the McCoy’s staff didn’t look hassled on Ursa day. They looked happy — and they had every reason to be. The big, boozy stout lived up to its name as a shining star.

The stars had lined up right, as well, for Yeager to join McCoy’s brewing team.

She had been homebrewing since her freshman year at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, but it was a chance meeting that brought her to the Westport mainstay. She was dropping off a few of her homebrews to a friend and bartender at McCoy’s when head brewer Morgan Fetters and Beer KC’s director of restaurants, Cory Puckett, happened to be at the bar.

“It was just kind of serendipitous how it worked out,” Yeager says. “They got to try my beers. I talked with Cory for probably an hour and a half. He had mentioned some expansion — he was sort of secretive about it, but he said there were big plans, and I should e-mail him my résumé. Four or five weeks later, I got the interview.”

Yeager interviewed with Puckett and brewmaster Keith Thompson at Beer Kitchen. She came prepared, toting about eight of her homebrews.

“I brought everything that I had: a really delicious barley wine, an IPA, the cider, everything,” she says. “We just poured them all and talked and went over my résumé. A few weeks later, I got the phone call. So it was really exciting.”

McCoy’s hired Yeager in mid-June as a part-time brewer.

“I get to do just about everything here,” she says. “I get my hands in everything: milling in, mashing in, mucking out, throwing the hops in, cleaning, filtering. I feel like I’m getting a really incredible, well-rounded education on how a brewery operates here.”

“There’s an Emily notebook,” says Randyl Danner, Beer KC’s director of beer.

“Yeah, there’s a notebook, and I kind of started sketching things out,” Yeager says. “That way, I didn’t have to keep asking, ‘How do I do this? What is this?’

“They treat me like just one of the guys,” she adds. “I’m doing everything they’re doing. It’s been really nice.”

Although the brewing industry has historically been a male-dominated profession, more and more women have started working in all facets of the business in the past decade.

“Here at McCoy’s, I think we’re really fortunate to have someone with the education that Emily has, with her background being in biology, because biology is so important to the brewing process from start to finish,” Danner says. “And she’s really good at it.”

Yeager credits her roommate, Alec Gratton, whom she has known since middle school, with sparking her interest in brewing. The two would make 5-gallon batches of oatmeal stout, IPA and cider. And they modeled their pale ale on Boulevard’s.

“That was the first recipe that we tried to perfect,” she says. “Not to mock their recipe, but we wanted something super-similar. It was awesome. We couldn’t brew that fast enough for friends. We were just drinking that way too quickly. We started having to do 15-gallon batches of the pale ale, which was three separate brews in one day with our setup.

“It strangely fit my degree,” Yeager says of beer. (She graduated from UMKC in May.) She had set out toward a career in pediatrics when a biochemistry class nudged her in a different direction. “I was like, ‘Hey, I could make a living out of this. This is something that I could see myself doing. I’m interested in it. It’s not a desk job where I’d have to sit.’ I’ve always worked jobs that were hands-on.”

Beyond the science, brewing was also a creative outlet for Yeager, who says she had never felt like an especially inventive person before she started brewing.

“I was never super-good at art, and I could never really play instruments very well. But brewing — there’s so much room for creativity, and it’s super-artistic,” she says. “That was sort of a refreshing realization when I figured that out. ‘Hey, I am creative in some way.’ I found a way to make science creative, in my mind.”

Yeager works on every beer in the McCoy’s portfolio but puts stouts and specialty malts at the top of her enjoyment list.

“It’s fun when you get to bust out the oats or the flaked corn or the chocolate malts or anything like that,” she says. “That’s always fun, and the aroma that you get when you’re brewing it smells so good. The IPA smells really good, too. We just brewed the West Coast IPA, and I think we had eight different hop additions in that one. The smell is just incredible all day when you’re throwing those things in.

“We have a lot of free space right now until we start brewing for St. Patrick’s Day, so hopefully we can do something fun,” she adds. “I’ve been really trying to push them for the pale ale because we really haven’t done that since I’ve been here.”

Danner says she hasn’t forgotten Yeager’s homebrews, either.

“Keith and I have had conversations about having her bring in a couple of her homebrew recipes and us scaling it up to be brewed on our system, and then, of course, naming it in some way that this is Emily’s beer and it’s being brewed on the McCoy’s system,” she says. “We just haven’t gotten to that point yet.”

Yeager also has been entrusted with piloting McCoy’s cask system. She’ll be tasked with figuring out something fun to do with 5-gallon batches of IPA or oatmeal stout. “I’m getting a little bit of creative freedom with dry-hopping and oak spirals and fun things like that,” she says.

Danner says the plan eventually is to make Yeager full time at McCoy’s. Yeager, who is also a server at Genghis Khan, says she’s looking forward to consolidating her life and focusing on one job.

“I plan to stay with McCoy’s as long as I can,” she says. “It’s been fun to see the customers enjoy the beer. I see it on a daily basis. People pop their heads into the brewery, ‘What’s going on in here?’ That’s really fun. You get face-to-face time with people who love your beer.”