Mystic Brewery Building Dedicated Wild Ale Facility

Photo courtesy of Didriks/Flickr

Today, Mystic Brewery founder Bryan Greenhagen announced that he’ll be upgrading their Chelsea facility to vastly expand upon its production of saisons and traditional wild ales. Not only will the brewery have a customized brewhouse and bottling line (specifically for bottle conditioned beer) up and running by May, but they’ll be quadrupling their barrel-aging capacity (upwards of 1,000 wooden barrels) and adding a traditional copper coolship (something seen at only a handful of American breweries), bringing the brewery closer to its ultimate goal: being one of the country’s largest dedicated producers of Belgian-style sour and wild ales.

“These kind of beers require patience and fortitude and it’s a long process to get genuinely traditional production flowing,” said Greenhagen via a press release. “We started over three years ago and have cast out hundreds of barrels of beer in the process of developing cultures for true wild ale brewing where, much like in the bread world, a great sour yeast culture is developed slowly, over time.”

Mystic has been assisted in the expansion by Cambridge Brewing Company from whom they purchased some of the equipment. CBC brewmaster Will Meyers will in turn be bringing production of their award-winning barrel-aged beers to the new Mystic facility.

Mystic Brewery was established in 2011 as one of the first Belgian Geuezestekerij-type brewery’s in the United States, in which unfermented beer is brewed at other facilities, but fermented and aged on-site. Greenhagen says the expansion was made possible after they secured an extended lease on their Chelsea property earlier this month.

174 Williams St., Chelsea; 617-466-2079 or mystic-brewery.com.