Drink up: Rhinegeist tripling production

Rhinegeist has revealed big expansion plans in keeping with the brewery's stunningly rapid growth. The brewery will nearly triple production this year as it enters the Columbus market, and will add a rooftop deck and an event center to its Over-the-Rhine facility.

Between purchasing the 112,000-square-foot building at 1910 Elm St. — in which it previously leased space — and undertaking the expansion, the brewery is spending $10 million.

The building purchase and expansion projects were five to 10 years into Rhinegeist's business plan, according to brewery co-owner Bob Bonder. The fact that they're happening less than two years after the brewery opened (in June 2013) is shocking even to Bonder and fellow co-owner Bryant Goulding.

In 2014, Rhinegeist was the top new craft beer vendor in U.S. supermarkets based on dollar sales tracked by market research company IRI, with $782,539 in supermarket sales. Those numbers are surprising, given that Rhinegeist just launched cans last Februrary and only had its product in five Kroger stores by last July; 65 by last September.

"Our projections were a lot more gradual than what was happening in reality," Bonder said. "We're already behind the demand curve by a lot."

A new 60-barrel brewhouse from German manufacturer BrauKon, which Bonder calls the "Mercedes of brewhouses," will help solve that problem. Three times larger than Rhinegeist's current system, it will allow the brewery to grow production from the nearly 11,000 barrels sold in 2014 to the more than 30,000 barrels the brewery expects to sell in 2015. And there's room to grow from there: As it stands, the new system will be able to produce as much as 50,000 barrels; with additional fermenters, Rhinegeist could grow to 100,000 barrels.

Housed in the building that adjoins Rhinegeist's current production facility and tap room, the new system will also be faster. That's in part because it's a four-vessel system, with separate mash tun and lauter tun, as opposed to the three-vessel systems used at many local breweries.

"The more vessels you add, the quicker you can start the next batch," Bonder said. That's because a process that once took an hour and a half in one vessel now takes 45 minutes in each of two.

Rhinegeist's increased capacity will allow it to expand distribution into Columbus in the coming months, using the same self-distribution model Bonder and Goulding have used in the Cincinnati, Dayton and Northern Kentucky markets. (They like the control over the service, beer quality and relationships that that model affords.) The partners are working to lease a 17,000 square-foot space near downtown Columbus to house a refrigerator and a fleet of vans to serve that market.

From there, the partners hope to expand throughout the region and eventually have Rhinegeist beer throughout Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.

Back at home in Over-the-Rhine, visitors to the brewery, which housed the Christian Moerlein bottling plant during pre-Prohibition days, will see changes, too. A new 7,000-square-foot roof deck along the building's Elm Street side, with a 24-foot draft bar and room for 200 people, should be ready by late summer. It will feature tables, standing space, greenery, wood decking and heaters for the shoulder seasons.

"It's going to be a big version of a patio party," Goulding said.

The new deck will afford views of the historic Jackson Brewery building, the city's central business district and the future streetcar stop on Elm.

Also under construction is a nearly 8,000-square-foot private event space for events of up to 250 people. It's housed in a part of the building that caught fire five or six years ago and was rebuilt with pine wood floors and exposed beam rafters. Rhinegeist will add restrooms and a catering kitchen, and the brewery has hired a full-time event coordinator to do bookings for the space, which should be up and running by September.

"People started calling us asking to have their wedding in the main space as soon as we opened," Bonder said. Though they had a few Sunday night weddings on site, "there was no amount of money that could make it worth closing down on a Saturday, because people are coming from all over (to visit the tap room). We didn't want to hurt the core of our business."

Those visitors will soon be able to take more formal tours of the brewery. Removing cinder blocks filling old windows in the current tap room area will allow visitors to see into the new production area. That part of the building is a two-story area of about 18,000 square feet, with a sawtooth roof and large, north-facing windows. To accommodate the new equipment – the fermeneters are nearly 30 feet tall – the brewery removed about two-thirds of the second floor.

All that new equipment will also allow Rhinegeist to grow its sour and barrel-aged program, using the old system for fun and experimental brews, Bonder said. The brewery has 120 to 150 barrels, mostly bourbon but some wine, to grow that part of the business. He said customers can expect to see more regular releases of those beers, possibly some in 22-ounce bomber bottles.

"Our long list of creative beers that everyone's been wanting to do, we'll start going through that list," he said.

Those limited release beers have been highly successful for Rhinegeist. Last Saturday, when the brewery hosted a release party for the return of its Saber Tooth Tiger Imperial IPA, was the busiest day in the brewery's history, with between 3,000 and 4,000 brewery visitors that day.

Rhinegeist expects to keep growing its staff, too. The brewery just hired its 56th employee, and the partners project they'll have more than 100 employees by 2017. From their early days of hiring only brewers and salespeople, the brewery is finding it now adding different types of jobs, which allows them to recruit talent from out of town. For example, the partners recently hired Cole Hackbarth, who worked in California at Full Sail Brewing and Golden Road Brewing and holds a degree in brewery science, as Rhinegeist's head of brewing operations.

Goulding said he himself moved to Cincinnati from San Francisco to open Rhinegeist with Bonder because both thought the craft beer market here was under-indexed and prime for growth. Still, they had no idea their company would grow so quickly.

"We're lucky," Bonder said. "It's a combination of timing and history and branding. It's not like we invented something new; we're making beer. So to see such positive results ... is pretty magical."