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A Few Clouds Going big, but staying small
Barrier Brewing moves to larger facility, doubles output
At the Barrier Brewing Company, the philosophy has always been about small: small batches of craft-brewed beer and an intimate environment with its customers. And though the company’s success allowed it to expand into a new building on May 19, it is still planning on keeping it’s philosophy intact.
The new building, located at 3301 New Street A2 in Oceanside, is almost five times as large as the original 1,000-square-foot building on Lawson Boulevard. More space means more beer — nearly three times the amount it is currently able to produce.
“Even as we grow, we want to maintain the same intimacy with people,” said Evan Klein, who established Barrier Brewing Company in 2009. “We’re going to keep running everything the same way, handling production and distribution ourselves, except with more efficiency now.”
Assisting Barrier Brewing Company’s aspired operational improvements at its new, 4,600-square-foot facility, located 1.7 miles from its original brewery at 3595 Lawson Boulevard, are a five-barrel brewhouse and six fermenters. The system, “a vast improvement” from Barrier Brewing Company’s initial brewhouse, “a pimped out one-barrel homebrew kit,” said Craig Frymark, was custom-manufactured by Diversified Metal Engineering (DME) in Prince Edward Island, Canada, and possesses four vessels: mash tun, lauter tun, brew kettle, and whirlpool.
Expected to increase annual production from 600 to 1,500 barrels — the equivalent of 18,600 to 46,500 gallons of beer — it was designed to compliment Klein and Frymark’s preferable production approach of small-batch, high-variety brewing (the duo currently brews 42 different beers).
“We love keeping things creative, not only for our customers, but for us, too, brewing new styles,” said Frymark, who joined Barrier Brewing Company in 2010, after working with Klein at Brooklyn’s Sixpoint Craft Ales. “We can transfer everything faster now, and brew four or five different beers in one day.”
While Barrier Brewing Company followed a similar schedule at its original facility, performing 12-hour, quadruple-batch shifts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, expansion was inevitable from the brewery’s inception.
