by Bea Peterson
It’s almost there. Garry and Kelly Brown’s dream of a brewery on the Walloomsac River in North Hoosick in the old Flomatic plant is very close to reality – very, very close. On Thursday, May 9, a tour of the plant showed all the equipment in place. Tour guide Gregg Stacy, Brown’s Vice President and Director of Marketing and Sales, said they were just waiting for some manufactured parts to arrive so they can begin brewing.
[private]The brewery, a labor of love, has been five years in the making at a cost of three million dollars. Stacy said Garry, working with Marty Miller, Peter Martin and several others, has done much of the work himself. He has found equipment on ebay, removed a floor and installed a new one to accommodate the vats that sit partway below floor level and built the stainless steel open fermenting tubs, for example.
The Browns, residents of Hoosick, opened Brown’s Brewing Company in Troy in 1993. It took three years of hard work to turn the River Street building, gutted by fire, into a fully operational craft brewery. It was the first brewery restaurant in the Capital Region and is New York State’s largest brewpub and the 25th largest in the Country. “That’s one of the reasons this project has taken so long,” said Stacy. “The restaurant has been so successful that it’s hard to find time to work on the brewery.” But work they must if they want to expand their beer sales. Ninety percent of the beer made at the pub is sold there. They currently brew 3,000 barrels of beer a year. When the new brewery is at capacity they will brew 20,000 barrels a year. A barrel holds 31 gallons.
Stacy finds it interesting that both Brown’s sites are on rivers and both are old buildings that have been restored.
The tour of the new facility began in the four vessel brewhouse where grain and water start the process. There is a hole in the floor that will have a stairway for the brewers to easily get from one level to the other. On Friday access near the vats was by ladder. On that level there is also a quality control lab and open fermenters that look like swimming pools. Stacy said this is a European and west coast style of fermentation, very much organic. On the lower level are the closed fermenters and the bottom of the vats that are upstairs. This part of the building has a removable roof making it easy to put in bigger vats. There is also a cooler and storage space. The building has its own well and waste water treatment plant.
The next stop was the bottle filling machines. Stacy said Brown purchased the bottling machinery from a west coast company. Popular in that part of the country are 12 ounce bottles that are shorter and fatter than the slim long necked bottles popular here. The least expensive route was to purchase new bottles and packaging. Hence, the new Brown’s beer will be in new style bottles.
The adjoining building, which we didn’t tour, will be used for storage, shipping and receiving.
The Browns have big plans for the future of the brewery. The first order of business, however, is brewing beer and getting it to the distributor. It will be distributed to Stewart’s, Hannafords and Price Choppers throughout the area. The goal is to distribute throughout New York, into Vermont and Massachusetts, but no further.
Brown’s is not hiring at the moment, and it will be a year or so before a tasting room is open. It will not have a restaurant. The landscape around the buildings is bleak. Stacy can already see how it will look in the future with attractive landscaping. There will be tables and chairs near the entrance to the tasting room. The tasting room itself will have a bar curved to match the open archway of the original building. The “boneyard” where extra equipment is stored will be used to grow hops and barley. With 40 acres, some on the other side of the River, there is plenty of room for expansion.
Still further into the future the building will have a hydro power plant, as it did originally. And solar panels will heat the water for brewing.
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