True to the Brew

Louisville, May 01, 2007 by Burnette, Eric

When the first modern-day commercial microbrewery in Louisville opened in 1992 as the Silo Brewpub on Barret Avenue, Pierce was ready for a career change. He was burned out by his job as a construction manager for a company specializing in commercial interiors, so he applied to be the Silo's brewmaster. Lacking a professional resume, Pierce got creative, submitting a case of his beer instead. The approach worked. He beat out two school-trained brewers with good curricula vitae but no actual beer.

Business started strong at the Silo, and he brewed at capacity there for about three months. But then the sales of Pierce's handcrafted beers started to slip. "The drop coincided with every time they put a new bottle beer on the list," he says. He left after less than a year, joining a partnership as a small-percentage owner in the original Bluegrass Brewing Co. in St. Matthews. There, he created more than 80 different ales, lagers, meads and other varieties. BBC eventually bought out the Pipkin Brewery and its facilities on East Main, and in 2001 Pierce split with his BBC business partner and former high school classmate at Southern Indiana's Floyd Central, Pat Hagan. Hagan kept the Shelbyville Road location (later adding the Fourth Street restaurant and bar), while Pierce went to the warehouse to focus solely on brewing and bottling. The taproom was added "mostly for educational purposes," says Pierce, as kind of a showroom and hangout for buyers and beerenthusiasts. Now, despite having basically the same name and the same recipes, the two branches of the business operate as separate entities, with Jerry Gnagy serving as the brewmaster for the Shelbyville Road eatery. Fourth Street serves beer from both breweries, according to Pierce.

His domain, located behind the Main Street taproom, encompasses a 17,000-square-foot bottling and fermenting room. The 16-foot ceilings are barely tall enough to hold the dozen gargantuan stainless-steel tanks. The agglomeration of enormous metal casks, snaking hoses, clanging bottles, grinding gears and vats overflowing with frothy liquid all look something like Willy Wonka's experimentation room.

A study in motion, Pierce whirls a forklift around a tight space, inserts its tines beneath a pallet of newly bottled beer and plants the huge six-by-six-by-six-foot cube on a massive stack of other pallets. He jumps off the forklift and connects one of many hoses to one of many valves on one of many vats. "I have to equalize the pressure," he yells over the din of the bottling machines. If he doesn't, the beer will lose its carbon dioxide and go flat.

Pierce then walks briskly over to another large tank - a mash tun, a name brewers share with distillers - and climbs the stairs to the top. Opening the hatch, he reveals a small sea of steaming barley mash that smells distinctly of Grape-Nuts, the breakfast cereal also made with barley malt. From this first vat, the liquid is siphoned off into another and, with certain types of beer, filtered before packaging. At each stage of the process the vats must be emptied, sanitized and refilled as soon as possible.