Boatyard Brewing Co. owners want to craft hub for art and beer

If you happened to stop into the Kalamazoo Beer Exchange in downtown Kalamazoo during the final weekend of June you might have noticed a beer--Calleigh Dry Stout--on the draught list that coincided perfectly with Kalamazoo's Irish fest, taking place across the street at the Arcadia Festival Site.

 

You may even have noticed the source that beer was a little-known brewery called Boatyard.

 

But as Kalamazoo's most recently opened brewery, Boatyard Brewing Co. does not expect to be obscure for much longer. Its offering on the Beer Exchange menu represents the brewery's initial foray into to market here in Southwest Michigan, a market it hopes to win over with a large selection of well-made craft beer.

 

"We've developed, over the past few years, about twenty-four recipes," Boatyard co-founder Brian Steele says. "We have our mainstays like Midnight Star, a black cream ale that has a little lactose in it that makes it silly to the tongue, we have blond, and Lost Peninsula IPA."

 

Steele and co-founder Dan Gilligan envision the brewery, located at 432 E. Paterson Street, growing into a north-side hub of artistic expression and traditional craft beer.

 

Housed in the old Smart Shop building where metalworking was an artform, Boatyard has the opportunity to grow and expand as beer lovers discover it. Steel and Gilligan own a full city-block worth of property and have plans to use as much space as necessary to craft and distribute their beer around Southwest Michigan.

 

"What we want to do is get the production brewery up and running, the tap room is next, then we'll turn the basement into a larger fermentation space and barrel room and a place that we can have a private dining room," Steele says. "As we need more space, we'll start looking at other empty parts of the building for things like a yeast laboratory, barrel room space, et cetera."

 

In the building used to be an oil depot, Boatyard currently uses about 9,000 square feet of space for brewing, kegging and for a small taproom where patrons can enjoy a list of rotating taps. 

 

 "The funny part was, it was a friend of our family who offered it to us," Steele says. "We figured it was going to be short-term but we worked here all last summer and decided that we'd be here forever. It was a great first choice of us; the building has its issues, but we're here to stay. I invite everyone to come back in ten years when the building is glamorous."

 

Much of the "glamorization" of Boatyard will be created by the hands of resident artists whose studios, located just south of the main facility, are on the brewery's property.

 

"There are fourteen artists that have studios within the two buildings. We're going to continue to renovate the spaces for the artists so they can stay," Steele says.

 

Steele and Gilligan are confident that with their combined background and desire to create high quality beer on a fairly large scale that Kalamazoo-area beer drinkers will want the duo to stay as well.

 

"Our goal is to do about five barrels a month with the little system we currently have. We want eventually to do 10 barrels in five hours. We're shooting for 500 barrels during the last half of the year and close to 2,000 barrels the second year. But as we grow we're looking at maybe 5,000 barrels a year."

 

You read that right: 5,000 barrels per year.

 

But Steele has plenty of reason to be optimistic about Boatyard's ability to create quality beer on such a large scale, and that's because both Steele and Gilligan have spent the better part of two decades learning the brewing trade before deciding to open their own business.

 

After initially brewing small batches for fun, the duo decided to take the next step in their education, by volunteering their time at the Saugatuck Brewing Company.

 

"After about four years of doing that we knew enough where we could sit down and ask if we could do this ourselves," Steele says.
 

The answer was a resounding "yes," so Steele and Gilligan went to work in Gilligan's garage, putting together the equipment and recipes that would soon become the backbone of Boatyard.

 

"After about six months of making beer ourselves, people were just enthralled with it, so we thought at least we can make the product," Steele says. "Last July after we started cleaning up (the building) we began realizing that we can build this, we can do this."

 

Now, one year later, Boatyard is leaving the dock and taking its maiden voyage into the open water that is the Kalamazoo craft beer market.

 

Steele and Gilligan plan to make the majority of Boatyard's sales through kegs sold to area restaurants, via Imperial Beverage, its distributer, but also plan to do a little bit of canning this coming August when Steele's buddy brings a mobile canning line to Kalamazoo.

 

"We're going to can our double IPA," Steele says.

 

With that project and many others like it in the works, Boatyard will continue to expand and grow its customer base in the hope that it will quickly go from obscure startup to area staple.  

 

"We're going to work to make this the new best place to be in Kalamazoo," Steele says.