Photo by John Fleury
For the past year, Neighborhood Restaurant Group (ChurchKey, Birch and Barley, Rustico, GBD) has been quietly transforming the shell of a Navy Yard factory into the city’s newest brewery with the no holds barred approach its co-owner Michael Babin has brought to all of his build-outs.
With 30 batches of beer done under the guidance of head brewer Megan Parisi and NRG beer director Greg Engert, Bluejacket (a nickname for U.S. sailors), the production side of the facility, has had all the systems tested and is ready to embark into the waters of commercial brewing. While the brewing is done far above the ground floor – with gravity used to move the ingredients from grain mash and lautering on the top level, fermentation tanks a floor down, and finally down to the bright tanks behind the main bar that will be used either to serve beers or store for further maturation – the brewery’s restaurant will be called The Arsenal, a nod to the building’s former munitions life.
Kyle Bailey and Tiffany MacIsaac, the husband-wife team running the Birch & Barley kitchen, will oversee the menu at The Arsenal and plan to focus on food items that are meant to be paired with the beers being made in the mezzanines above. Utilizing a “nose-to-tail” approach, dishes such as pickled sausage and fried pig tails sit along side Porchetta Hoagies and pork belly carbonara with pasta made in-house from the spent grain from the beer.
The impressive brewery nicely balances the bare-bones functionalism of a factory with a natural warmness through creative lighting and dark wood flooring and accents. During the day, the 5,600 square-foot space will be filled with natural sunlight and an openness that is hard to get in the city. At night, the mood stays intimate and noise levels were much lower than predicted considering the amount of surrounding steel and glass.
Photo by John Fleury.
So what about the beer? With 20 beers ready for the opening next Tuesday, there is a variety of styles that will make the connoisseurs happy but still some very approachable beers that those looking for a quick drink before a game can appreciate. The brewery utilizes different style fermenters and even a coolship – a large, shallow vat originally used to cool beers down before the days of mechanical refrigeration, which also allows naturally occurring yeast and microfauna in the air to produce those “farmhouse” flavors many of us love in our belgian beers – in order to accurately produce a number of styles.
Bluejacket also will be doing a barrel-aging program that will include a number of spirits, including rum and bourbon barrels as well as oak barrels that have been previously used to hold wine. While Bluejacket will produce much more than a typical brewery-restaurant (about 5,000 barrels annually), Engert says more than half of the yield will be going out to other bars in the city and eventually the distribution will be spread even further. Some bottles will also be made and sold in house. While many here in the U.S. prefer draft beer, many styles benefit from bottle conditioning, especially when aging.
With a number of breweries and brewpubs in the city, it is refreshing to see yet another purveyor of such a diverse beverage come to fruition.
