Nothing Subtle about Avery Brewing

If you want to turn a cute little goldfish into a carp-sized behemoth, dump it into a pond. Keeping the little guy in a bowling ball-size bowl will just frustrate him and stunt his growth.I

When Avery Brewing opened the doors Feb. 16 to its state-of-the-art, $30 million brewery on Nautilus Court in Gunbarrel, you could just feel the years of frustration and limitation give way to a craft brewing organism eager to get its grow on.

After years of wringing every last pint out of the 43,000 barrel a year brewing system wedged into a row of industrial units in an alley off of Arapahoe Road across from the Boulder Municipal Golf Course, founder and owner Adam Avery was ready to kick his operation into high gear.

“We made way more beer there than we should have,” Avery said. “We won’t be all moved in until about the end of this month. But we’re still looking ahead to the next phase.”

He said that once all the old tanks and equipment they plan on using at the new brewery are in and connected, they will be able to brew about 100,000 barrels of beer a year with ease; more than double the former capacity.

And because the new brewery was designed with easy expansion in mind, Avery could continue to grow in their present location to about 350,000 barrels a year. Such capacity would launch Avery into the top 10 craft breweries in the country based on production. But that’s a long way off.

In the months and years ahead, look for Avery to reinstate distribution to the several states that it had to pull out of in recent years because the old brewery just couldn’t meet the demand.

Among the biggest changes in the new brewery is the addition of a kitchen and menu that is just as big, bold and flavorful as the beers Avery brews.

And while the new facility was built to grow, Avery brewers are first learning how to manage the tremendous horsepower of their new brewing system. New gear, such as a wet mill that will cull dust, chaff and small stones from the grain before it’s ground and sent to the brewing kettle, will extract as much sugary goodness as possible from the grains. And hop cannons more efficiently extract hop oils during the boil. “Our first batch of IPA we brewed here, the IBUs (International Bittering Units; a measure of a beer’s bitterness) are supposed to be about 67,” said Ryan Freismuth an Avery sales director who was showing visitors around on a recent afternoon. “With this new system, we were at almost 200 IBUs because it was so much more efficient.”

Other equipment will also keep Avery at the forefront of brewing technology, such as a CO2 capture system from Boulder based New Sky Energy (located literally down the street from the new brewery). The carbon dioxide produced during the fermentation process will be captured and converted to mineralized forms of CO2, like soda ash and baking soda. The former material will be used to make Avery beer bottles.

One of the best things about the new brewery is the larger lab, said Ryan Minior, another Avery Sales Director who was showing off the new digs. “The closet of our new lab is bigger than our entire old lab,” Minior said. “So instead of being focused on quality control, we are now focused on quality assurance, so we know the beer that leaves here is exactly what we want it to be.”

Despite the cramped quarters in the old brewery, Avery became a leader in the craft beer industry for its quality control focus on every aspect of the brewing process; something made much easier now with its new state-of-the-art lab and staff.

“We have seven microbiologists on staff here,” Minior said. “New Belgium, who brews about 10 times the amount of beer we do, have only one or two more scientists than we do.” Those beer geeks look at every aspect of every ingredient that goes into Avery beer to make sure it measures up. From the mineral levels in the water to the sugars available from the malted barley, to the viability and integrity of the yeast — several strains of which were developed by Avery — to the IBUs in each batch, no aspect of the brewing process and ingredients used goes unchecked.

And beyond that, Avery uses an extensive sensory program in which employees are enlisted to perform blind tastings of their beers to ensure they aren’t straying. “We like to say, ‘Our geeks are better than your geeks,’“ Minior said.

Other modern innovations include the use of natural sunlight in the brewery and its offices, through the use of solar collectors as well as an interconnected brewing system in which any brewing, fermentation or bright tank can be connected to any other in the system with only a 6-foot hose. Kind of like an old-fashioned telephone switchboard.

Additionally, walkways that crisscross the cavernous building about 15 feet off the brewery floor give visitors a birds’ eye view of the whole place. Members of the public can now see the entire brewing process — from milling to boiling to fermenting and canning — safely and without obstruction. Avery said it will let visitors do self-guided tours anytime they want.

“It’s a very transparent environment here,” Avery said. “Everything is in view; we even put windows in our centrifuge room (where wort is spun at high speeds to precipitate out any remaining solids). You can watch the entire process.”

And while much is new and improved with the new building, much has not changed. The barrel aging program, in which high gravity, sour or experimental beers are put up in whiskey, bourbon, rum, wine and tequila barrels to mature and assimilate the subtle, or not-so-subtle, characteristics of their containers.

The barrel room is still there, but it’s only visible through a sliver of a window in the lobby of the new building. Avery said it is not open to the public and is kept at negative pressure to ensure the funky bacteria, wild yeasts and other odd organisms doing what they do to the concoctions in the barrels won’t fly out and contaminate the other beer that they work so hard to control.

But according to Freismuth, the fundamental character of Avery hasn’t and will not change, despite the shiny new digs. “Avery is about making really bad-ass, quality beer,” he said. “It’s the best beer you can get. And we’ll keep on brewing the beer that we want to drink and hopefully there will be enough people out there that will want to drink it, too.”

And as for how fast this newly free goldfish will grow in its new container? “It already seems too small,” Avery said.