Six new players prepare to enter KC’s craft-beer community
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Everything goes better with beer — including, in Kansas City, beer.
A community that already seemed to add taps by the day has surfed a big, malty wave the past year or so, with Cinder Block, KC Bier Co., Rock & Run, Green Room and Big Rip becoming operational (and Martin City Brewing Co. adding a micro operation and a taproom).
Now there’s another swell on the horizon.
Six new breweries are gearing up to open in the months ahead, some by the end of this year. The owners of each are chasing craft brewing’s 7.8 percent market share in a $14.3 billion industry. Luckily, they’re doing it in a place that’s not just thirsty but also vying to be a major U.S. craft-beer destination. So grab a tulip glass, mark your calendar and make note of these ambitious new brews on the way.
Crane Brewing Co.
Location: 6515 Railroad, Raytown
Opening: June 1, 2015
Notable beers: Duchamp (saison), Marcel (dry-hopped Duchamp), Magenta (beet Berliner weisse), Ruby (beet beer), Hippie Moses (Israeli red)
Construction is still a couple of months away, but the Crane Brewing Co. already has a distributor. Michael Crane’s brewery is set to work with Central States Beverage, to send kegs and 750 ml bottles of the future Raytown brewhouse’s sours and Belgian farmhouse ales into the marketplace.
“It’s totally unheard of, from what I understand,” Crane says of the deal. In the equivalent of a bidding frenzy when a hot writer is finishing a book, Crane fielded unexpected calls from CS Bev, Missouri Beverage Co., Major Brands and North Kansas City Beverage Co. after he took his product to the Parkville Microbrew Festival earlier in the year.
“My feet didn’t touch the ground for a long time,” he says.
Since then, Crane Brewing has been in high demand. Crane has accepted festival and event invitations as fast as he can brew the beer — including The Pitch‘s Crafts & Drafts Saturday at the Uptown Shoppes.
“By getting our name out there and people talking about us, I hope that when we do get open, they’ll continue to talk about us and buy our beer,” he says.
Crane has assembled a full team — which he calls “magical” and likens to “a marriage with multiple partners” — that includes vice president Chris Meyers, operations manager Aaron Bryant, CPA Jason Louk, and brewers Steve Hood (a graduate of the American Brewers Guild) and Randy Strange (who graduated from the Siebel Institute of Technology).
“We’re going to have to make a lot of beer, and it’s going to have to be excellent and it’s going to have to be consistent,” Crane says. “Having two professional brewers is going to make a huge difference.”
Crane says he has secured verbal commitments to fund the brewery and open by June 1 in part of the 18,000-square-foot building that’s home to his other business, Funblock Inc., which manufactures classroom and storage furniture. He envisions running a 15-barrel brewhouse with 15- and 30-barrel fermenters. He says the smaller fermenters will be for some “wild yeast experiments,” while the bigger setup handles saisons, cream ales and other everyday beers.
“We still have a business to do and can’t rely just on the beers that are going to take three years to age,” Crane says.
Before the fuss around his product, Crane was concerned that craft-beer drinkers wouldn’t venture to Raytown. Not anymore.
“It’s been a pleasant surprise, the number of people who have come up to us and say thank you for doing this in Raytown,” Crane says. “There’s as high of a percentage of craft-beer enthusiasts in Raytown as there is anywhere else. It’s just that they have to go somewhere else.”
Construction is slated to begin December 1, with the brewhouse going up first. Once the taproom is done, Crane plans 15–20 taps. Meyers wants to see an “endless number of rotating beers that you can only get in the taproom.” He adds, “Our big thing is, we don’t want to have any flagship beers. That way, we can keep rotating different beers with fresh fruits, sours.” Among the ideas under discussion: a collaboration with Hugo Tea and a hard cider with the Louisburg Cider Mill.
In the taproom, the plan is to fill growlers and sell bottles. The goal is to become a destination brewery similar to Crooked Stave, Jolly Pumpkin and Prairie Artisan Ales. The production target is about 3,000 barrels a year.
Crane says he’ll keep Funblock, which he has run for 21 years, until the brewery needs more space for expansion or barrel aging.
“I own the building, so negotiating with the landlord shouldn’t be too difficult,” he says.
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Stockyards Brewing Co.
Location: West Bottoms
Opening: Summer 2015
Flagship beers: IPAs, pale ales, dark beers
Greg Bland is planning to open a brewery in the West Bottoms.
“We’re evaluating spaces in the old Stockyards District of the West Bottoms — more specifically, right on Genessee,” says Bland, the founder of Stockyards Brewing Co. “We’re working with an architecture firm now to make sure that we have the space that we need down there in the Bottoms.”
Next year, the 28-year-old intends to leave his job as director of environmental services at Travois, a consulting firm that his father started about 20 years ago, which finds financing for low-income housing and economic-development projects on Indian reservations. After that, it’s all beer all the time.
“My job here is great, and I love working with my family and all of my other co-workers here,” Bland says. “But I’ve always loved factories and the industrial process of the United States and how industry actually works. This is my way of getting to do what I truly love.”
The plan is to open a 15-barrel brewhouse with a cellar capacity of about 75–100 barrels and a taproom in a yet-to-be-named space in the Bottoms. Bland says he chose the Bottoms because he wanted to be part of the growth with Genessee Royale, Voltaire, the Livestock Exchange Building, apartment construction and whatever Kemper Arena becomes.
“I love that people are coming back down there,” Bland says. “I think it’s a really exciting time to be working our way down there. The history of the Stockyards and the West Bottoms is just so awesome. Of the 22 to 25 buildings that were originally down there, 21 of them housed either a brewery or a bar.”
In 2010, Bland graduated from the University of Colorado. In Boulder, he was surrounded by new breweries. Then he returned to Kansas City.
“We have Boulevard, which is fantastic, and I always heard about new ones coming up or soon to be opening,” he says. “But after leaving a city that had about 100 breweries within a 10-mile radius, I kept wishing for something more here in Kansas City. So I’m really excited to see the ones opening up now.”
Bland started homebrewing eight years ago and still produces constantly on his half-barrel, all-electric system. “Every weekend, I try to produce as much as I can,” he says. “I can run through it pretty quick.”
He has also taken classes at the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago. He plans to hire a brewmaster next year.
“I’m pretty confident that we will surpass my skills quicker than I would like,” he says. “So I want to be able to have someone on hand that has had commercial experience and can run a commercial production facility, and I’ll be able to facilitate the management and run the business as well as help formulate recipes and sales.”
Bland has two friends in mind to work with him who would come to Stockyards from breweries in Milwaukee and Minnesota.
“I’m trying to get them to see how awesome Kansas City is,” he says. “Now that we’ve got a World Series baseball team, maybe they’ll be more excited to come down.”
Bland says he’s still pulling together financing and hopes to begin construction in the first quarter of 2015, with an opening targeted at the end of the summer.
“We’re hoping to turn in the first year 1,000 to 1,500 barrels and then work our way up to 5,000 barrels over the next few years,” he says.
Bland says Stockyards will brew “90 percent ales” and a couple of lagers throughout the year, along with test brews. Two of his beers, a mosaic IPA and a Kentucky common cream ale, are on tap at Travois.
“We’ll probably have a couple different varieties of IPAs that’ll just come and go with what hops are available at the time,” he says. “We’ll go through them and create a unique style of IPAs as we roll through, and then also have dark beers that come and go throughout the season.”
Stockyards’ taproom is slated to be open five days a week, serving from six full-time tanks and two or three rotating small kegs for test batches. He won’t have a full-service kitchen, but he wants to book food trucks or offer prepackaged meat-and-cheese plates — or have his drinkers patronize his neighbors’ places.
“There’s such great restaurants with Voltaire and Genessee Royale, and I’ve heard of one or two other restaurants opening up down there, too,” he says. “So I love people being able to come in and have a beer and then go have dinner.”
Once Stockyards is up and running, Bland expects to add distribution, starting in kegs and then adding cans and large-format bottles.
“We want to spread through Kansas City as quickly as we can,” Bland says, “but all of that will probably come from the feedback that we get in the taproom. We want to make sure that the beers that we’re putting out there are the beers that Kansas City wants to drink.”
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Torn Label Brewing Co.
Location: 1708 Campbell
Opening: Fall 2014
Flagship beers: Daily Dose (coffee wheat stout with Thou Mayest Sumatran toddy), Monk & Honey (Belgian-American table beer with Missouri honey), Alpha Pale Ale (session pale ale)
Torn Label Brewing Co. sits on the eastern edge of the Crossroads Arts District, in the Studios Inc. building. To the east, U.S. Highway 71 is visible from the gravel lot that wraps around the building. There’s a loading dock, but Torn Label’s front door — beyond which is a 15-barrel system of silver tanks towering over the 7,000-square-foot space — isn’t as easy to see.
Rafi Chaudry and Travis Moore like being hard to find. They want their brewery to be a destination for beer drinkers, a bit of a secret awaiting discovery.
“Someone at First Friday could hop over and check us out, but if you didn’t know we were here, no one is going to wander by,” says Moore, Torn Label’s brewmaster. “A lot of people thought: Isn’t that bad for business? Well, we’re primarily a production brewery. Our bread and butter is not going to be the taproom, so we want the people who come to the taproom to drink our beer to be there because they sought us out, not because they wandered by.”
On this mid-September day, Chaudry and Moore are running a test batch.
“Right now, we’re just focused on getting full speed on the actual production side,” Chaudry says. “We want to do American craft, which I know is such a vague way of explaining it, but we see that very much as a melting pot of styles.”
About a year ago, Chaudry, who grew up in Overland Park, and Moore, originally from Olathe, moved back to Kansas City. The two had met at the now-defunct Daily Dose coffeehouse bar in Overland Park, before seeking their fortunes in other places. For the past seven years, Chaudry worked as a film producer in Los Angeles. One job put him together with Chad Troutwine, who shared a love of beer. The two discussed starting a brewery together. Troutwine and his mother, Carol Troutwine, decided to invest.
Meanwhile, Moore was enrolled in law school in Chicago when, about a year ago, Chaudry called and asked him to move back to Kansas City to become Torn Label’s brewmaster. That same day, Moore was offered a job at a law firm where he had worked as a law clerk. Moore went with Chaudry instead. At his going-away party at the firm, Moore was given a mug that read, “I’d rather brew beer than be a lawyer.”
“I like to say we rescued him from law school,” Chaudry says. “It was certainly a leap of faith in every conceivable way. But at the same time, we never even thought twice about it once we got to that point. We all sort of walked away from our previous lives to get this going. Anybody who knows us, I don’t think this is all that surprising but inevitable.”
In January, Torn Label moved into the Studios Inc. space. Construction is ongoing. The 35-seat taproom is still unfinished, but the opening could come as soon as January. In mid-September, Torn Label began production, and several batches are now in the tanks.
“It’s certainly been exhausting and daunting and challenging, but that feels like what we should be doing,” Chaudry says. “It’s a lot more rewarding to come home exhausted at the end of the day brewing as opposed to doing things that are necessary for brewing but not brewing.”
Torn Label will start primarily as a production brewery, distributing kegs — and later in 2015, 22-ounce bomber bottles and cans — in Missouri through Major Brands. Then the plan is to send beer to Kansas. The brewery also aims to fill growlers, begin a barrel-aging program, and experiment with hoppy and sour beers.
In its first year, Torn Label hopes to produce 3,500 barrels, a schedule that Chaudry calls “ambitious.”
Torn Label’s focus will be on three beers: a session pale ale, a Belgian Trappist–inspired beer and a coffee wheat stout.
“We wanted them to be approachable kind of beers that someone looking for something a bit more adventurous than what they’re used to might want to take a leap on,” Chaudry says. “At the same time, [we wanted] something a little bit more challenging and enticing about all of them.”
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Red Crow Brewing Co.
Location: 207th Street and U.S. Highway 169, Spring Hill
Opening: Summer 2015
Flagship beers: Isabelle (Belgian blonde), Frances (pale ale), Donna (wheat), Elaine (rye porter)
On a crisp, sunny Sunday afternoon in mid-October, Chris and Mistie Roberts celebrated their 12th wedding anniversary by brewing beer in the garage of their Olathe home. The silver kegs held Chris’ first attempt at a German altbier, as well as Mistie’s favorite, a pale ale that the couple calls Frances.
Besides their wedding, they were celebrating a couple of other milestones. There was Mistie’s upcoming half-marathon, her first. And there was the idea to open Red Crow Brewing Co. together by summer 2015.
“Hopefully for just another year,” Chris Roberts says of his day job. After that, he means for the business to “turn into our full-time jobs.”
For now, Red Crow is a second full-time job for both of them. He works as a Sysco delivery driver, and she’s a stay-at-home mom who also works part time at an Olathe hospital. (Mistie’s parents, Joe and Loretta Fisher of Chapman, Kansas, are the couple’s partners in Red Crow.)
The day after their anniversary, Mistie Roberts seems relieved. The couple’s 10-month search for Red Crow’s headquarters might be over. “That’s kind of been a disaster for a while,” she says of the search.
She says they’ve been offered a deal they couldn’t refuse in southern Johnson County that will get the brews out of their garage. It’s a 4,000-square-foot space being built from the ground up in Spring Hill, Kansas. The building will be shared with Artistic Concrete Solutions. It’ll also have an outdoor patio.
“We will be, if not the first, one of the first to open in Johnson County,” she says. “Hopefully, the first.”
When Red Crow goes live, Chris Roberts plans to brew his four core beers — each named for influential women in his and Mistie’s lives — and various seasonals on a seven-barrel system. (He’s also testing a Belgian IPA to see how it goes over with drinkers.) Red Crow’s initial production, he says, will be “modest,” despite the ability to pump out 400 barrels a year for in-house sales (topping out at 1,750 total barrels).
“The state requires us to do a 100-barrel minimum to maintain our brewery license,” he says. “If I have to brew more, that’s a happy accident.”
Red Crow’s mission won’t stop at brewing beer. The Robertses plan to challenge Johnson County’s 30 percent gross-food-sales requirement for breweries with a spring ballot initiative.
“If we don’t do it, we don’t see anyone else doing it,” Chris Roberts says of opening in Johnson County and challenging the old law. “We’re going to be the ones to kind of blaze a path.”
In the meantime, Red Crow plans to offer snack foods and work with a caterer.
Six years ago, before the birth of the couple’s second daughter, Chris Roberts started making beer. He joined the Kansas City Bier Meisters homebrew club, and the first person he met there was Michael Crane. (Read about Crane Brewing Co.’s plans on page 9.)
“One of my assets is … I’m a little obsessive,” Chris Roberts says. “When I find something that I love to do, I educate myself on it thoroughly. I’m a giant nerd. That’s the best way to describe it. I love making stuff with my hands, and I love to do something myself. I’d rather learn how to do something myself than have someone do it for me. That’s always how I’ve been.”
That’s how Roberts has approached building his family’s brewery. After he taught himself how to brew, he built a small laboratory in his basement to propagate his own yeast. Now he’s building small computers so he can monitor the temperature of his beer off-site. And once Red Crow is up and running, he wants to enroll in the Siebel Institute of Technology for formal training.
He knows that none of it will be fast. “We want to build brand awareness in our taproom,” he says, “and then slowly push our stuff out into the market.”
When Red Crow does hit the market, it’ll be in kegs and possibly bottles or cans — a decision still under discussion. Until then, the Robertses are keeping a list of the festivals they plan to hit next year. This past year, they gave out samples at the KC Nanobrew Fest and the High Plains BrewHoff. But they skipped the Parkville Microbrew Festival.
“That was our daughter’s first communion,” Mistie Roberts says. “Our motto is ‘family first.'”
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Border Brewing Co.
Location: 406 East 18th Street
Opening: Early 2015
Flagship beers: A blonde, Patio Ale (extra pale ale), Rooftop Red (American red), a double IPA, Campfire Porter (porter aged on oak chips), chocolate-milk stout
Border Brewing Co.’s three-barrel system sits in crates lined up near the French doors inside the future Crossroads brewery. The crates are partly torn open, like Christmas gifts. And Border’s founder and brewmaster, Eric Martens, can’t wait to play with his new toys.
“We’re going to be setting up equipment next week,” he says. He wears a dirty, white T-shirt and blue jeans. “We got our brewer’s license last week, so I’m itching to get going.”
It’s early October, and much work lies ahead, but a walk-in cooler has been assembled, and a west-facing wall has been erected between the future brewery and a neighboring business.
Until about a month ago, Martens, a 2008 Kansas State graduate, worked as a consulting engineer for Burns & McDonnell.
“It was a great job,” he says of the position, which he held for six years. “I was making good money, but I don’t think it was my passion, and I really wanted to go into business for myself.
“It’s a little scary,” he adds, “but it’s mostly exciting to be able to have this opportunity to go after what I’m really passionate about and say that it’s my job.”
Martens took a night class about brewing when he was in college, and he says he has been making his own beer since he turned 21. His first batch was a wheat beer for his fraternity brothers. They drank it two weeks too soon.
“We learned a lesson of patience,” Martens says, “and it actually turned out pretty good.”
Brewing grew from an expensive hobby to, he says, a “full-blown obsession.” He signed a lease for the 1,750-square-foot space in May. (A Facebook follower has claimed that the upstairs was a speakeasy in the 1920s; Martens has yet to verify that.)
“It’s no bigger than we need, obviously,” Martens says. “I’m worried it’s going to be a tight squeeze, but it’s going to have a cool feel when it’s all said and done. You’re right in there with the brewery. The brewery is central to everything.”
Border’s taproom will be at the front of the house, with seating that wraps around his fenced-off brewing system.
Martens says he “took a leap of faith” when he tore down drywall on the east-facing wall. His optimism was rewarded with exposed brick and a big window facing an alley. “It turned out to be a really nice, big, beautiful window,” he says. “I think it’ll look really nice when we get the glass fixed.”
The window looks out on a new neighbor: Double Shift Brewing Co. (See page 12.) But Martens doesn’t sound concerned.
“We’re not competing against each other,” he says. “We’re competing against this idea that there’s only one style of beer, which is still kind of predominant in America — the light Pilsner lager. If you have a guy next door that’s doing that alongside you, then you have twice as much firepower to accomplish that goal.”
Martens says he searched for six months before finding his Crossroads location, a spot across the street from Grinders and Crossroads KC.
“I love the First Fridays and the art culture down here,” he says. “I live down here, and it’s a short drive to work. It’s really starting to develop and thrive along with downtown and the streetcar going in. I’m excited for the area.”
Martens says he means for Border to be an interactive brewery, with patrons voting (via social media and in person) on what his taproom serves.
“We’re going to thrive on that feedback and keep things changing all the time,” he says. “One nice thing about having a small system is, you make one batch and if it’s great, you keep making it. If it’s not, it’s not a whole lot of beer.”
Martens hopes to find distribution for his beer after six months, meanwhile building partnerships with local wineries and distilleries for a future barrel-aging program.
Martens says Border’s name is more than just a nod to the Kansas and Missouri border. He’s trying to bridge a gap that he sees between commercial and craft beer — “the gap between beer drinkers and beer lovers,” he adds. He sees his blonde and his pale ale as “gateway beers” for new craft-beer consumers. “We want to be able to bring people in who, maybe they have and maybe they haven’t tried craft beer before, but they try ours, and it’s approachable and it’s still interesting and good.”
Martens says he’s aiming to open by early 2015, but he knows it’s an ambitious timeline. The tanks and the bar are in place, but there’s still a lot of work left. “We’ll have to see how things go,” he says. “We’re in the middle of the consent process for our liquor license.”
If opening a brewery from scratch isn’t enough of a challenge, Martens and his fiancée are getting married December 20.
“It’s going to be a pretty busy end of the year but a pretty exciting end of the year,” he says. “By the time January rolls around, we’ll be ready for a big sigh of relief.”
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Double Shift Brewing Co.
Location: 412 East 18th Street
Opening: March or April 2015
Flagship beers: White IPA, double IPA, saison, pale ale, rye
The “for lease” sign still hangs on the green brick wall outside the former Craft Gallery & Studio on East 18th Street, but the building has been claimed.
Aaron Ogilvie, a 26-year-old Leawood firefighter and homebrewer, plans to run Double Shift Brewing Co. (named for the 24-hour shifts that his profession requires) inside the 2,500-square-foot brick building.
“We’ve been looking down here for eight months, and it seemed like we started the lease process with several different buildings and it just didn’t work out,” Ogilvie says. “And this one just came on the market a couple of weeks ago.”
The lease is signed, and Ogilvie plans to fill the space with a five-barrel electric system, 10 barrel fermenters and a taproom. (He has five partners, including his father, Scott Ogilvie; Paul Stark; Mike Pollock; and Rick and Joan Redhair.) How big is that? “We’re about the same size as 75th Street,” he says. “They’re a little bigger but not much.”
To do that, the building needs a face-lift. In the coming weeks, Ogilvie wants to install a door that faces 18th Street. Oddly, the entrance now is in an alley, but it will be replaced by roll-up garage doors. Inside, Ogilvie plans to tear out the white cubbies that line the walls.
“We’re still sourcing every little piece of equipment,” Ogilvie says. “I think we have our major suppliers picked out. We’re excited to get stuff done finally. It seems like it’s been awhile. It’s a long process.”
The brewery has been three years in the making, but Ogilvie’s passion for brewing started five years ago with a friend. “I don’t have a degree in chemistry or biology or anything crazy like that,” he says. “It kind of became a passion of mine.”
He and Matthew Hornung, who is now a partner at Brew Lab in downtown Overland Park, brewed beer for parties and weddings, where people always asked one question: “Where can we get it?” Ogilvie decided it was time to have an answer.
He’ll start Double Shift with five core beers. “I really like Belgian stuff,” Ogilvie says. “It’s kind of what got me into brewing. But I’m not traditional. Everything we do will be a different take on it. Especially being a smaller brewery, you just can’t do the same old thing that Boulevard down the street is doing or Schlafly or whoever else.”
About six months ago, Ogilvie spent a day brewing with Big Rip Brewing Co., and he has talked with Cinder Block Brewery owner Bryce Schaffter about what it takes to start a brewery. He has also gotten advice from the guys at Torn Label (see page 11) about licensing.
When the brewery opens, its 60-seat taproom will have 10 taps for Double Shift’s core beers and experimental brews. Double Shift will also fill growlers. And he’ll keep working as a firefighter.
“Luckily, they allow me to do stuff like this on my day off,” he says. “I love my job. I like going to work every day. I don’t have any plans, but if this becomes something huge, then I’d probably hire someone to be the business manager. I don’t have any plans to leave my job.”
