K.C.’s Boulevard Brewery comes of age

John McDonald, founder and president of Boulevard brewing Co. in his Kansas City office.

John McDonald made no bones about his love of beer. The founder and president of the Boulevard Brewing Co. in Kansas City said his fascination with brewing goes back to his youth.
“I grew up in a Western Kansas small town,” he told me as we talked in his small, crowded office inside the brewery. “That’s kind of what we did when we were kids. My dad made a little home brew, which you know was more of a conversation piece than something good to drink.”
John said you had to add a little tomato juice to his dad’s home brew to get it down. Once you did, “It packed a wallop,” he said, laughing.
John grew up and moved away to college at Kansas University, earned a fine arts degree and became a cabinet maker and carpenter.
It was on his first trip to Europe that John’s eyes were opened to the vast number of beers available and the traditions small European brewers embraced.
“I just fell love with English ales,” he said. “When we were in Paris, I stumbled in to a Belgian beer bar. My wife would go to museums and I would go back to the bar every day. They had 400 different bottled beers from all of these different breweries. I was just like, ‘Wow, this is crazy interesting.’”

In 2009 Boulevard was ranked the ninth largest craft brewer in America.

Finding financing
It wasn’t long until John’s interest in brewing became more serious and he decided to put his career as a carpenter on hold.
“I started thinking about a brewery in the mid ’80s,” he said. “I was always enamored with the idea of small production beer and wine.”
Over a four-year period, John admits he went down “a few wrong roads,” but finally, in 1989, raised enough money to start the brewery. Raising the money needed to get going wasn’t easy. He met with about 30 bankers and a lot of disappointment, but kept searching for financing.
He eventually found the funds needed to get started, but, to this day, remembers one nay-saying banker.
“He was a young banker at a bank downtown and I was still working as a carpenter,” he said. “I meant to go home and take a shower and change my clothes and then go to the bank. I was kind of dusty with my work clothes on and he said, ‘Dude, first of all, I think your business plan is totally crazy and second of all, next time you come see a banker, you better put a suit on.’ So, I took his advice and bought a new suit.
“It didn’t help me, though,” he said, laughing. “I just wasted the money on a suit.”
John ran into the same banker years later, after the brewery was successful. The banker, he said, “was fairly apologetic.”
In 2009 Boulevard was ranked the ninth largest craft brewer in the America by the Brewer’s Association. John said the quick success of Boulevard surprised even him.
It’s really a great time to be a brewer, John said.
“It’s great to have access to technology that we didn’t have back when we started. We’re as automated and as high tech as any big brewery. It’s a constant battle to make sure that the craftsmanship part of it, the quality of the beer, is the most important thing.”

Julie Weeks, marketing communications manager, said the Boulevard team is excited about the new 12-ounce four packs of selected Smokestack Series beers.

Best beers in the world
One Boulevard beer, their unfiltered wheat, the company’s most prolific product, accounts for more than 60 percent of their business.
“I thinks it’s been so popular because of the unfiltered nature,” he said. “That’s what makes it good, the lack of processing, and it’s real easy to drink. It’s an American style wheat beer. It’s not something that’s going to put anybody off and it’s got a nice flavor to it.”
The company’s Smokestack Series of craft beers pays tribute to old world craftsmanship. It is available in small batches that are sold in 750 ml corked and caged bottles. Some Smokestack beers are now available on tap and several varieties are newly available in four-packs of 12-once bottles.
John said it’s really “amazing” what’s going on in American brewing.
“Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the best beers in the world are being made in the United States,” John said. “We need to create more beer culture. That’s what missing. We have these great beers, but the population doesn’t really know what to do with them or how to drink them, compared to (drinkers) in Belgium, England or Germany.”
Unlike American beer drinkers, Europeans tend to pour their bottled beer into glasses, rather than just tipping the bottle back.
“If you can get people to pour beer into a glass, that’s half the battle,” he said. American brewers, he explained, originally marketed their beers in bottles to maximize the label recognition and brand marketing.
“Shame on them,” he said. “They never should have done that. Look at the wine industry. You wouldn’t think about drinking a $10 bottle of wine out of a bottle.”

Some of Boulevard's Smokestack Series beers are aged in oak barrels in a climate controlled room at the brewery.

Kansas City’s brewery
Not all of Boulevard’s brews have met with acceptance and success.
“The one beer that was a total flop, that I still think was a good idea, came out in the mid ‘90s called Ten Penny,” he said. “The idea was to make a beer that tasted good that had low alcohol. We came out with this baby version of a pale ale that had a really good flavor that had like 2.6 percent (alcohol). You could just slam them. As soon as the consumer found out that it was low in alcohol people just wouldn’t drink it.”
Boulevard’s Bully Porter, a dark, chocolate-forward, American-style porter doesn’t set any sales records, but John said they will keep it in the line.
“I love that brand and the beer, but we don’t sell hardly any of it,” he said, looking a little disappointed. “I don’t understand why, but we don’t. We will keep making that brand. It’s part of who we were and who we are.”
Who they are, John stressed, is Kansas City’s brewery.
John pointed out that five years ago there were three breweries that made 85 percent of the beer sold in the U.S. and they were all owned by Americans. Five years later, all three are owned by foreign interests.
“Anheuser-Busch was one of the largest brewers in the world for a long time,” he said. “Well, that company, AB-InBev, is now four times as big as AB was and it’s all through acquisition. Does the world get better because of theses global conglomerates? I don’t think so.”
It’s all about efficiency, John said.
“So, if in this striving to be more and more efficient all of the time, eventually you don’t employ anybody,” he said. “That person who was going to buy your beer doesn’t have any money to buy it. It’s sort of a long term self-defeating prophecy to keep going that way. My thing is drink our beer and we’ll give somebody a job, which is what people need, jobs.”
Good philosophy.
Cheers!