E-Malt.com News article: USA, NY: Lost Borough Brewing Company plans expansion

The Lost Borough Brewing currently occupies a garage in Webster, not an ideal spot for an aspiring microbrewery. However, the company has launched a Kickstarter campaign to help move it into a proper building in Rochester, Rocherster Democrat and Chronicle reported on February 24.

"We always joked around that we should start our own brewery someday," says Dave Finger, co-founder and co-owner of Lost Borough. These initial ideas came from a guys' night ritual in which Finger and his friend, Dan Western, visited a new restaurant or bar every Wednesday.

"One of the things we really noticed is that there's not a lot of selection ... of craft beer," Finger says.

Convinced he could do better, Western bought a home brew kit. For the next couple years, Wednesdays became brewing night. The friends started with an extract kit, which provides a carton of grain sugar goo to be combined with yeast and fermented into beer. It only took three batches for Western to lose satisfaction with the paint by numbers approach, skip several steps in the natural brewery progression, and go straight to all-grain brewing, which calls for raw, natural ingredients.

"Brewing is something I'm very passionate about," Western says. "I wanted to get the true flavors of the grain."

The beer isn't the only thing Western built from the ground up. He also made the brewing system they're currently using for testing and tasting. Standing 10 feet in the air, it employs old Anheuser-Busch kegs, a boat winch and gravity to ease the brewing process.

"As with many homebrewers, I'm a person who likes to do everything myself," says Western. "It gives me some satisfaction saying, 'I built this,' then drinking my beer and saying, 'I built this.' "

As Western and Finger transitioned from guys who like beer to the Lost Borough Brewing Co., their identity founded itself in authenticity and variety. For example, their Peanut Butter Porter is made with real peanut butter.

"In a 10 gallon batch, there was probably half a gallon of peanut butter," Western says.
If red ale trumped red tape, the guys from Lost Borough would already be serving pints. But that's not the case. Besides the fundraising — the pair has set a $20,000 goal on the Kickstarter campaign, which ends March 16 — they still need to finish the licensing processing before the retail space can become a farm microbrewery.

"We have to pay rent on a space for eight months before we can actually sell beer," Finger says.

The daunting task and cost of this process caused Lost Borough's founders to pause and consider if starting a brewery was truly an option. Finger and Western have plied their savings to the task already, $40,000 between the two of them. They decided to move forward, and launched the Kickstarter campaign on February 14.

The demand for Lost Borough brews has been growing steadily, Finger says. In October, they hosted a free tasting for family and friends, just promoting the event on Facebook.

"We thought we'd get about 50 people and we had over 200 show up," he says. "We had eight different beers on tap and went through 50 gallons in four hours."

They hope the opening date will be in August.


26 February, 2014