Max Lachowyn has made the rounds of Columbus beer makers. He schlepped kegs at Elevator Brewing Co., co-founded Actual Brewing Co. and, for the past two years, brewed for Seventh Son Brewing Co. Now, he gets to do things like that for himself.

Max Lachowyn has made the rounds of Columbus beer makers. He schlepped kegs at Elevator Brewing Co., co-founded Actual Brewing Co. and, for the past two years, brewed for Seventh Son Brewing Co.

Now, he gets to do things like that for himself.

�All of that experience came together to make this work,� Lachowyn said of his new venture, Kindred Artisan Ales, as a team of plumbers and electricians buttoned up pipes and wired fixtures in a 15,000-square-foot space in Gahanna that will house the business.

With $3 million from a group of investors, Lachowyn and partner Pat Gangwer, a veteran of Jackie O�s Pub and Brewery in Athens, will start filling kegs for distribution this month and hope to bottle beers later this year.

They also plan a separate taproom on Morrison Road in Gahanna, slated to open in March.

Kindred is the latest in a slew of new or expanding craft-beer makers in the region. Ohio now has more than 150 craft brewers, of which more than two dozen are here in central Ohio. The state might top 200 by the end of the year, said Mary MacDonald, executive director of the Ohio Craft Brewers Association.

�We all know we are seeing a big boom, and people are putting money into this stuff,� Lachowyn said. �I wasn�t looking to leave Seventh Son. I ran into people looking to make this investment, and the time was right to do it.�

The fact that people are looking to invest in beer is a sea change from just four years ago when Lachowyn, now 27, helped cobble together Actual Brewing Co. from used tanks and repurposed odds and ends.

He�ll brew his first batch of Belgian wit beer this month on a shiny, brand-new, stainless-steel, 30-barrel system already primed for major expansion.

�At the time (Actual Brewing Co. was founded), there was nobody willing to invest like this,� Lachowyn said. �Now, you can read about the craft-beer business in Forbes.�

The surge in local beer production and breweries isn�t near saturation, said Tim Powell, a food and beverage analyst and consultant for Q1 Productions.

�A key trend in all of this is the desire to be unique and find the next hot product, and craft beer allows consumers to do this,� Powell said. �I would also put it down to changing consumer tastes. It�s hard to go back to a bland cup of coffee when you�ve had a premium, bean-to-cup option. It�s the same with craft and mass beer.�

Kindred will be unique in its dedication to a rising style � sour beers.

Gangwer will head up a sour-beer and barrel-aging operation at the taproom.

The entire idea for Kindred Ales began with a conversation about starting a small sour-beer brewery, Lachowyn said. They realized they needed a production brewery to subsidize the sour beers at the start, though sours might be the next big thing.

�Sours are one of those trending things that people are just starting to get into,� MacDonald said. �It is an acquired taste; it requires a little more education. It is just another statement of how far craft brewing has come.�

Gangwer has three used tanks that will form the core of his end of the business. He worked for two years handling barrel-aging, yeast propagation and quality testing at Jackie O�s. No one else in central Ohio is making sours in large volumes.

�We�re going to get weird,� Gangwer said of his ambitions at the sour and barrel-aging side of the business. Aside from tart beer, he wants to experiment with aging in wine barrels, bourbon barrels and more. Those beers won�t be ready for months, though, as yeast and bacteria need time to work their magic.

Lachowyn plans to launch with four core beers: the Belgian wit, a saison, a porter and a tart Berliner weiss.

Kindred is projected to make 4,000 barrels of beer this year, about a third of what Columbus Brewing Co., the region�s largest craft brewer, produced last year and on par with production at Actual Brewing Co. With enough fermentation tanks, Kindred�s business can grow more than fourfold before straining capacity.

Gangwer and Lachowyn think growth will come quickly, but they won�t push to meet numbers just for the sake of it.

�Slow, methodical growth� is what Lachowyn says he plans. �But there is no telling where this thing will take us.�

jmalone@dispatch.com