True to the Brew

Louisville, May 01, 2007 by Burnette, Eric

With 26 years of amateur and professional microbrewing under his belt, Bluegrass Brewing Co. virtuoso David Pierce has yet to lose the fire for creating the next great small-batch beer.

On an early Friday evening, East Main Street is quiet, almost deserted, in stark contrast to the bustling gallery and restaurant district one block south on Market Street. A small sign above the door of a nondescript warehouse on the corner of Clay and Main reads "Bluegrass Brewing Company."

Through the door is a room of less than 1,000 square feet, with hardwood flooring, a half-dozen tables and walls decorated with antique beer memorabilia. Eight ales are on tap, A bearing the same name as the sign outside. The unassuming bar is called a "taproom," not a pub or tavern, because no food - unless you count popcorn - is served. What's more, the low volume of customers might lead to questions about the sustainability of the business. Yet among the dozen or so patrons sits a man whose influence is spreading. He is David Pierce, the craftsman who brews the BBC beers you buy in liquor and grocery stores, and he is in many minds the most talented microbrewer in the Louisville area.

Pierce, 49, seems to really enjoy this place, since, after a full day of tending the mash runs, he is still here, drinking his beer, smoking and shooting the breeze with his two-man crew and a handful of regulars. His low-key demeanor belies considerable professional success. Modest yet confident, Pierce never volunteers praise of himself, but he doesn't diminish his accomplishments. Asked how many medals his beers have won at juried competitions, Pierce simply,laughs and says, "I don't know ... a lot." number, by the way, is 12 medals and counting.

His Bearded Pat's Barley Wine has been particularly successful, with five gold medals. Barley wine is a type of very strong beer served in what looks like a squat wine glass. It has almost four times the amount of hops as BBC's next-hoppiest beer, the American Pale Ale (usually most prevalent in pale ales, hops give beer its bitter flavor), and carries a whopping 10 percent alcohol content. Among those to sing the praises of the barley wine is Michael Jackson (the Robert Parker of beer critics, not the former King of Pop), who wrote, "I was stunned by the hop aroma, superb clarity, fresh maltiness, smooth body and peppery warmth."

The barley wine wasn't always a winner for Pierce. He describes the first batch of it as "the most fun disaster" he's ever had brewing. Midway through the process, the morass of hops floating in the fetal barley wine was so thick that the only valve on the fermenting tank became clogged, allowing pressure to build. "I started undoing the clamp and it blew apart, and I got covered - I mean covered, from head to toe - with green hops," Pierce remembers. Since then, he always keeps an extra set of clothes at work.

The BBC Beer Co.'s recent push into new markets is also bringing attention to Pierce's craftsmanship in new places. Managing director Scott Roussell is leading an effort to distribute bottles and kegs of the brewery's three core products - the pale ale, a nut brown ale and an attention-grabbing bourbon barrel stout (it's aged in used whiskey barrels) - that has penetrated into Indiana, Tennessee, southern Ohio and Virginia. West Virginia will be added soon.

BBC's beer man is a good-natured, jocular and bespectacled ball of energy. Standing just 5-foot-7 and fond of wearing shirts from other breweries along with a baseball cap over his spiky hair, Pierce relays brewing stories that are equal parts humor and technical expertise, often peppering them with a bit of salty language. The beer in one hand and the cigarette in the other seem to be mere extensions of his hands as he waves them for emphasis during his stories.

Like many microbrewers, Pierce got his start by homebrewing, to which he was introduced by his father. One of his dad's beer books was among Pierce's earliest influences, and it is now one of his most cherished possessions. The tattered, yellow volume tells its readers, "If you follow instructions, your home brew will be good, very good - your first batch and every batch." Actually, by his own admission, Pierce made four straight batches of some pretty bad "malt-flavored alcohol" following one of the Prohibition-era recipes in that book. The then 23-year-old future brewmaster was on the verge of giving up. His fifth attempt, however, showed improvement. "By the sixth batch," he says, "I was like, 'OK, I'm not quitting.' "

For 12 years, the hobby assumed an ever-larger place in Pierce's life, until he was running what amounted to a weekend microbrewery out of his garage with $2,500 worth of equipment. "That included a draft system and all that," he recalls, along with two dozen five-gallon kegs, two dozen glass carboys (multi-gallon bottles) and a separate refrigerator just for lager to control its temperature.

All told, he was making up to 500 gallons of beer annually, which he confesses was "well-over the legal limit" for homebrewers. But Pierce qualifies this by noting that he did not personally drink all of it. "When you have beer on draft at home," he says, "it's kind of like putting in a swimming pool - all of your friends come over."