E-Malt.com News article: USA, CO: Vine Street Pub opens a new in-house brewery

After a four-year planning and construction process, Denver's Vine Street Pub opened a new in-house brewery this week, Dailycamera.com reported on April, 18.

The new 3,500-square-foot facility will be the "workhorse brewery" that supplies the Vine Street Pub in Denver and the Mountain Sun and Southern Sun pubs in Boulder with the bulk of its beer, says brewer Brian Hutchinson, including staples such as Colorado Kind, XXX Pale Ale, FYIPA, Quinn's Golden Ale, Annapurna Amber and Blackberry Wheat.

This will free up space in the relatively cramped brewing facilities at both Boulder locations to brew more lagers and Belgian-style beers, which tend to take longer in the fermentation tanks, as well as specialty and pilot-batch beers.

The Boulder locations have a combined annual brewing capacity of about 3,000 barrels. The new brewery's capacity is more than 5,000 barrels annually, with room to grow.

"For the first time, we're going to be able to make enough beer to fill all of our own taps," says Hutchinson, who will continue to oversee brewing operations for the company. John Fiorilli will be head brewer at Vine Street.

Mountain Sun and its sister locations differ from typical brewpubs in that all of the beer is served from kegs, rather than from serving tanks. It's a more feasible solution to keep the 21 taps at each location flowing with a ready supply of beer.

"We're basically a production brewery that distributes to our own restaurants," says Hutchinson.

All of the beer brewed in the new brewhouse will be kegged and housed in a large cold storage area before it's distributed to the three pubs. The increased capacity also opens up the possibility of additional Mountain Sun locations opening soon, as well as distributing beer to other bars and restaurants. For example, the newly opened The Kitchen Denver currently has Mountain Sun's Hop Vivant on tap.

The new brewhouse also incorporates efficiencies designed to increase yield and minimize downtime between brews, including a large silo that holds 30,000 pounds of malted barley, a gristmill for milling the grain, and an in-house lab that will help with quality control.

Vine Street Pub will host a Smokin' Hot Anniversary Party to celebrate the opening of the new in-house brewery and the four-year anniversary of the Denver pub.


20 April, 2012