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Port City Brewing Company thought this would be a monumental week, with stores in Western Maryland selling their microbrews for the first time and sales expected to spike ahead of Independence Day. Instead, owner Bill Butcher and head brewer Jonathan Reeves were sweating in their dark Alexandria brewery Monday, trying to deliver generator power to their ever-warming tanks of craft beer. The brewery lost power in Friday�s storm. (Alexandra Garcia/The Washington Post)
Adding to the anxiety: The brewery’s ale and lager yeasts were warm and getting warmer and could eventually spoil.
The Dominion Virginia Power guys already had come and gone, taking pictures of the downed lines but leaving without offering a service-restoration timetable.
(Matt McClain/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) - Bill Butcher, owner of Port City Brewing Company pushes his son, Key, 8, on a cart through the brewery's darkened facility on Monday.
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The brewers were running a small generator outside the steamy warehouse in an industrial section of Alexandria — “it’s for the radio and our coffeemaker, and we’re charging cellphones,” Butcher said — but the big find was a 75-kilowatt generator powerful enough to run Port City’s cooling system. Miraculously located, it arrived on a United Rentals Truck trailer from Manassas just before noon.
“This is a welcome sight — just awesome,” Reeves said. “I hope it works.”
If not?
“It will just commit suicide,” Reeves said, explaining that at a certain temperature, the fermenting brew would become undrinkable. “It would taste like nail polish.”
With extensive heat exposure, the beer in the other tanks — thousands of gallons of lager and ales and such — could eventually become stale or spoil, too.
He got in his car to fill up three 20-liter tanks with diesel fuel while everybody else waited for the electricians to show up.
A customer dropped by to return an empty keg. His review was rave: “Only three drops left,” he told Butcher.
By mid-afternoon Monday, the electricians had arrived to connect the generator.
Shortly after 5 p.m., they had it hooked it up to the cooling system.
Within minutes, temperatures in the tanks began to drop.
“Things are looking good,” Butcher declared.
He’ll drink to that.
UPDATE: Having saved the beer, the Port City guys have decided to party it up. They’re throwing a kegger Tuesday, to toast a new state code that allows Virginia breweries to serve beer 16 ounces at a time in their tasting rooms. (Previously, they were limited to six-ounce pours; the code took effect Sunday, and Port City Brewing Co. had planned to throw a pint party that day before the derecho knocked out the power.)
The party will run from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m., and it’s BYOB. As in Bring Your Own Sweat Blotter: The tasting room’s air conditioning isn’t yet running.
Bonnie Benwick and Lena H. Sun contributed to this report.
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