STRONGSVILLE-

Heading into 2012, Chris McKim's plans for Brew Kettle, Inc., were pretty simple.

“We were just going to ride off the success we built up last year, and not do anything too crazy,” he said.

But that’s not exactly what happened.

“We weren’t 30 days into the year and I was already ordering $100,000 tanks,” McKim said in the threshold of a 20-foot garage door, rain on one side and steam from a boiling concoction that will one day be White Rajah IPA on the other.

McKim has secured a 3,000-square-foot space adjacent to the Brew Kettle Production Works, the beer company’s brewery arm, located at 20102 Progress Drive, and is in the middle of gutting it to house the brewery’s bottling facility, which will free up space for two new 1,300 gallon fermentation tanks and a 1,000 gallon bright tank, where beer naturally carbonates itself.

The plan is to take the brewery’s bottling facility, which is basically just a corner of the 5,000-square foot warehouse-style brewing facility, upgrade it and move it into the new space, a project McKim expects to be finished sometime in September.

The problem is not speed, McKim said, as the current bottling setup can fill about 24 12-ounce bottles per minute, six at a time. It’s that the current bottling setup is kind of cumbersome.

“Right now, each bottle gets handled seven times before it gets packaged,” McKim said. “In the new facility, when it’s all done, we’ll cut that down to two.”

Plus, the new space - a renovated office - will be HVAC controlled, unlike the brew floor, so the temperature will be a constant 75 degrees.

“It’s a lot easier to bottle beer at room temperature than at 90 degrees,” he said.

The impetus of the expansion came when McKim and his team of five brewers realized no matter how much beer they brewed, it was never enough.

“We sell it literally as fast we can make it,” McKim said. “And, as we started buying more tanks, we started running out of room.”

In all its growth, the Brew Kettle is not alone. The craft beer industry has seen a revival in the last few years, growing its sales in dollars by 15 percent for two consecutive years, while beer sales overall were down 1.3 percent, according to statistics compiled by the Brewers Association.

And of course, an industry can’t grow without a workforce.

Nationwide, craft breweries employ more than 100,000 people, and McKim is responsible for five of those jobs - for now.

“When this expansion is done, we’ll be up to seven full-time, dedicated positions,” he said.

The two new fermentation tanks - where the beer goes after its been boiled and before it’s bottled or kegged - will bring the Brew Kettle’s arsenal up to nine tanks, and nearly quadruple the brewery’s annual output capacity to 8,000 barrels of beer.

With 31 gallons of beer in a barrel, that adds up to about 2.6 million 12-ounce bottles of beer - not bad for a guy who started brewing in his basement, before opening up in 1995 as Ringneck Brewing Company with a humble three-barrel system.

Since then, the company has expanded seven times, and now Brew Kettle beer is available "in all 88 Ohio counties," McKim said.

“We’ve gotten calls from Seattle, Pennsylvania, New York, Kentucky, Michigan, Illinois, about distributing our beer there,” McKim said. “But we can’t even brew enough beer for Ohio. If we get to a point where we have beer left over here, then we’ll start selling it across state lines.”

And McKim said this isn’t even the end of the plans right now - the Brew Kettle hopes to acquire another space in the building to house its paper goods and bottles, currently stored in a warehouse on Prospect Road, sometime in the spring.

Brew Kettle, Inc., is sprawled across the city - the brewing facility on Progress Drive, the goods warehouse on Prospect, the 13,000-square-foot Brew Kettle Taphouse and Smokeroom at 8377 Pearl Road.

McKim said he's amazed at the company's growth, but it’s another aspect of the Brew Kettle’s success that continues to floor him.

“One of our cooks is married to a server - and just last week they just bought a house together,” he said. “That’s the coolest thing. Knowing that this thing I started now buys people houses, pays for college tuition, buys new cars. That’s so cool.”

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Contact Shaffer at (216) 986-5479 or cshaffer@sunnews.com.

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