Craft Brewery With Built-In Dreams

By Daniel Fromson, The Washington Post

February 19, 2013

From the ground floor of the future Bluejacket brewery — the 7,300 square feet that will contain the bar, restaurant and storage space — a visitor can tilt back his head and gaze into a soaring atrium. Wrapping around the emptiness is a horseshoe-shaped mezzanine. The mezzanine, in turn, is surmounted by a small third floor, like an announcer’s box at an amphitheater. Sparks flew and tools roared on a recent weekday as Megan Parisi, Bluejacket’s head brewer, led me to the top.

In this former Navy Yard building where workers once made boilers for ships, a construction crew welded the glass-and-steel skeleton of a business at once familiar and new. “All of the brewing will take place up here,” Parisi said. But the real excitement, the fermentation, will occupy the mezzanine level. There, we met Greg Engert, Neighborhood Restaurant Group’s beer director, who started talking about oak barrels, a sensory analysis and yeast propagation lab, and a whopping 19 fermentation vessels, including some that are rarely seen outside a handful of Old World breweries.

Translation: If most craft breweries are akin to spacious but modest homes, Bluejacket, when it opens in May or June, will be a small mansion with all the amenities.

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