USA, MA: The Cape’s third and newest brewery to open in early summer

The Cape’s third and newest brewery will open in early summer in the Jailhouse Tavern, with a little help from the peninsula’s oldest maker of beer, Cape Cod Times reported on February 14.

Cape Cod Beer in Hyannis has sold some its tanks to the Jailhouse, where they will be the main equipment for a brewpub. Cape Cod Beer co-owner Beth Marcus said the deal involved the 15-barrel, three-vessel brewhouse and three 15-barrel fermenters. Each fermenter can hold about 500 gallons of beer, she said.

“We’ve been talking about it (starting a brewpub) for a little over five years,” Jailhouse co-owner Mike McNamara said.

The restaurant on West Road has been operating as the Old Jailhouse Tavern since 1984, and incorporates the iron cell bars that, back in Prohibition days, the town constable put in a bedroom of his home to hold prisoners overnight on weekends, according to the business’s website.

McNamara and partner Mark Powers bought the restaurant about three years ago, dropped “Old” from the name, and are renovating the building. The brewpub will be located where a carport once stood.

“We got some nice, industrial-looking windows (for the brewing area), … getting concrete poured for floors,” McNamara said.

Initially, the brewpub will serve an IPA, a wheat beer and a stout, he said.

“We want to limit ourselves out of the gate to three year-round beers,” McNamara said.

In addition, the tavern will have guest taps featuring Massachusetts and other Cape beers, he said. Tasting flights and sales of growlers will be offered. Spent grain from the brewing process will show up in the menu as an ingredient in crusts for gourmet pizzas.

As a former employee of Irish stout giant Guinness, McNamara knows his state and federal beer regulations, which can be difficult for brewery owners to wade through. He also appreciates Irish pub culture, in which the local community gathers at the neighborhood pub.

“Everything centers around the pub,” he said.

Construction and installation of the brewhouse should be completed by late May, McNamara said, “then we’ll do a number of batches to make sure everything’s OK.”

Cape Cod Beer does not view the brewpub as competition, Beth Marcus said.

“People seem to think it’s like an us vs. them sort of thing,” she said, adding that she and her husband Todd, co-owner and brewmaster, are friends with the founders of Devil’s Purse Brewing, which opened last year in South Dennis.

“What the beer community needs to understand is that it’s not an us-vs.-them. We all need to survive. It can’t be, ‘I drink your beer, but I don’t drink their beer.’ We drink all the beers, because local beer is going to improve our local economy more than beer that is shipped in from California,” Marcus said.

Cape Cod Beer had similar origins to the Jailhouse Tavern. In 1999, Todd Marcus was running a small brewhouse for Hyannis Port Brewing Co., a brewpub on Main Street in Hyannis. After a few years, the couple launched Cape Cod Beer on Phinney’s Lane, and the business has grown steadily in its mission to make and self-distribute beer on the Cape while supporting community projects and local small businesses. That continued growth is the reason for selling some of its tanks, to make room for a new 30-barrel, three-vessel brewhouse that’s being trucked in from California and due to arrive early this week, according to Beth Marcus. She said the new equipment will allow Cape Cod Beer to brew twice as much beer in the same amount of time or the same amount amount of beer in half the time.

McNamara said that the explosion of microbreweries in Massachusetts excites him, and he welcomes more growth on Cape Cod.

“I hope the Cape becomes the next hot spot for breweries,” he said.

17 February, 2016