Metropolitan Brewing

After class today I took a trip to check out the facility at Metropolitan Brewing in Chicago. First impressions - very cool brewery. Metropolitan is a newer brewery, they have only been in their facility for about 6 months, brewing there for the last 2. They run a two vessel 15 bbl mash/lauter tun and brew kettle with four 30 bbl fermenters, so they have to do 2 brews in a row to fill a fermenter. Doug and Tracy the owner/operators of Metropolitan Brewery were really cool and had no problem showing me around, answering my questions and of course getting me some beer samples. The brewery is in an awesome old building and they have enough space to easily expand their capacity with some more fermenters. Here are a few pictures I took:

Mash/Lauter Tun and Brew Kettle

Fermenters

If you notice the white sheet in both pictures and the weird looking metal thing above the Mash/Lauter Tun (it is a bull), those are there because a theater group in the area has been putting on a production called "BEER" in the brewery. The area in front of the fermenters is the stage and there is seating off to the right of the picture. I might try to make it up to a show and will be sure to give a review of it if I do.

You cant really see it in the picture of the fermenters, but each one had a name on it. Doug said the names are all characters from the original Star Trek or something like that, which got me thinking, it I were to name fermenters, what would I do. I think I would have to name them after the members of the Wu Tang Clan. Just think about rolling into a brewery and seeing "Ghostface Killah" "RZA" and "Inspectah Deck" on the tanks, awesome. If Wu Tang with the likes of "O.D.B" or "Masta Killa" is too much, then I would resort to Seinfeld characters. I think "Art Vandelay" "Cosmo Kramer - The Ass Man" and "Hennigans" have nice rings to them as well. Hennigans also would be a great name for a Scotch Ale for that matter. Enough of that...

Some brief information on how they started things up: They spent last summer brewing batches multiple times a week on their 6 gallon home brewing system. This test beer was taken to beer festivals over the summer to get their name out and get feedback on their beer. Once they got their financing in place, they got a new 15 bbl system out of China. They already had their recipes dialed in from the summer and have been cranking out beer for the last few months.

I am very interested in the direction they took with the brewery though, starting with lagers. Not a lot of craft brewers make lagers, but I think if you can make a solid lager there is a bigger market for them than ales. The big problem with making lagers is they generally take twice as long as ales to go from brew day to kegging. So you need more fermenters to put the same amount of product through the door, that leads to more wip, money tied up in inventory...I'll stop now, you get the point. This is something I need to learn a little more about, but I really want to work on making a great lager. It is a whole different topic, but I did find out that the water in Boise is very suitable for making light lagers, I'll see what I can do.

Anyway, Metropolitan Brewing makes some solid lagers and have a really cool facility, so those in the Chicago area should be on the lookout for their stuff (only draft right now, they said bottles are coming soon).