TANK(S) 8
Cases of Boulevard’s Chocolate Ale ship in February. the Smokestack Series, bottled exclusively at Boulevard’s Roanoke plant. “I’m like a kid in a candy store,” Elbow says. “I could never get tired of this.” This being December, he’s also glad for a break from 15-hour days packing chocolate for the holiday season. The bottles are first cleared of any air by the filler, which pressurizes them by creating a carbon-dioxide vacuum. Beer then fills the bottles. A second blast of carbon dioxide removes any air between the top of the bottle and the cork, inserted by two metal prongs that squeeze it like robot fingers. Air is blown across the top in an attempt to remove any residual beer, because the sugar in the liquid acts like glue and can make popping the cork difficult. (To further ease opening, Boulevard has switched to larger corks.)
“We are now known for those corks,” Pauwels says. “I like the wine ritual of opening corks. It says this is something special,” Elbow adds.
conditioned for a period of weeks, not far from a wall of Boulevard founder John McDonald’s wine casks. “In this city, there’s a chance to work with a lot of people on great projects. It gets me through the day-to-day,” Elbow says. “It’s like cross-training.” He then tells Pauwels that he has held on to a bit of Chocolate Ale from last year, in his beer cellar, drinking it as recently as November. “The chocolate subsides a bit. It was drinkable, but it wasn’t what it was,” Elbow says. “This is not a beer to hold on to. It’s meant to be drunk,” Pauwels says. Beer drinkers are already lining up to take the brewmaster’s advice — and marking their calendars for 2013.
“IT BECA ME SOMEW HAT OF A GA ME.
IF YOU GOT SOME, YOU WON.” A magnet grabs the cork cover, a thin metal cage, before the bottles proceed to the labeler, a machine purchased from Stone Hill Winery. The labels are rolled on with a sponge, and the finished bottles are hand-packed into cardboard boxes by the case. They roll off the line at a rate of 35 to 40 a minute. The beer is chilled and bottle-
T
he Boulevard Brewing Co.’s original cellar is getting a makeover, courtesy of eight new fermentation tanks that are being installed at the northwest corner of the plant. Kansas City’s El Dorado architectural firm has designed the 35-foot-tall glass enclosure that will house the cellar expansion, extending from the original cellar walls. The tanks, each of which weighs 12,000 pounds, hovered above Southwest Boulevard last Thursday, manuevered into place by a 200-foot-tall crane. In 2011, Boulevard made approximately 158,000 barrels of beer, now sold in 21 states. When the installation is complete, the brewery’s fermentation capacity will increase to just over 200,000 barrels a year. The tanks, designed and built by the Paul Mueller Co. of Springfi eld, Missouri, are expected to be operational in April. Each tank holds the equivalent of 100,000 12-ounce beers.
E-mail jonathan.bender@pitch.com
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