Boulevard breaks ground on Cellar Five expansion

Boulevard Brewing Co. broke ground this morning on the $12 million expansion project known as Cellar Five, which increases the brewery’s fermentation capacity by 40 percent and by 75,000-80,000 barrels. 

Boulevard founder John McDonald and other dignitaries did the ceremonial groundbreaking and dirt tossing at the 3,600-square-foot Cellar Five site, which will face Southwest Boulevard. Once completed, Cellar Five will house six 1,000-barrel fermenters. 

Dali Grabar, project manager on Cellar Five and part of Boulevard’s engineering team, tells The Pitch that construction will begin in December or early January, depending on permits, with a target completion date of June or early July 2015.

“It’s going to be in the next month or so,” Grabar says. 

Grabar admits that the six-month timeline is “aggressive.”

“Obviously, we are working through the winters, so there are some unknowns with that,” Grabar says. “You prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”

Grabar says Cellar Five will be built to house 12 tanks, but Boulevard is starting with six, 1,000-barrel fermenters. So future expansion isn’t out of the question.

“Maybe by next year we need more tanks,” Grabar says. “That’s why we’re building the building bigger, so we are able to add six more tanks. You’re basically prepared for the next phase already and anticipate the needs of the brewery.”

Here are renderings of what the finished Cellar Five expansion will look like.

Next to Cellar Five will be an 8,400-square-foot utility and process building. Along with Cellar Five, Boulevard is installing a $2.5 million effluent equalization system and filtration centrifuge.

The effluent equalization system will process water used by the brewery. That project will begin in December or January, Grabar says. 

“We’re going to connect the old system, upgrade everything and then basically we’ll have much larger capacity to handle wastewater,” he says. “That’s part of the project, but it’s a separate project. And the centrifuge is an upgrade of our existing filtration system that separates yeast out of beer. It will increase our speed by 30, 40 percent. That makes the new facility a little more efficient.” 

Boulevard has tabbed Rau Construction as the project’s general contractor, CRB Engineers as the design lead, PMA Engineering as the structural engineer, and Kaw Valley to do the geotechnical work.