The Boulder Junction Brewing Company combines Tracy Converse’s love of brewing beer with Ian Brown’s dream of running a brewery.
It appears to be the perfect venture for the couple that met at Lake Anne Brew House, a brewery in Reston, Virginia.
“Ian, at one point, said to me, ‘Would you ever consider opening your own brewery?’ And I said, ‘Sure, as long as all I had to do was brew and nothing else,’” said Converse. “He said, ‘that's great,’ because he is a finance nerd and loves operations, and when he tried to home brew, he exploded his beers.”
Then the discussion came of where to build their brewery.
Converse grew in north central New York. Brown in central Illinois. Neither were places they wanted to move back to and where they were living in Virigina was quickly filling up with Breweries.
“I've been a big fan of Boulder Junction for most of my life. Started coming here going to camp when I was 10 and the zip code 54512, always meant I'm going to camp,” said Brown. “It's been a dream of mine to be able to live up here. To be able to create something like this, as the means of getting here, has made it that much more special.”
In 2022, they bought the old Blueberry Patch.
While they had hoped to modify the downtown Boulder Junction building, it couldn’t work structurally for what they needed, so they tore it down.
“And then we waited, because also in a small town like Boulder, there is no infrastructure for water or sewer, so we had to be on a well, and we had to be on septic,” said Converse.
Environmental Stewards
That’s a challenge in a business like brewing beer that uses a lot of water, even more so when you’re like Converse and Brown and want to minimize the environmental impact. Being good environmental stewards is part of the mission statement of their brewery.
“The lakes, the water quality, the outdoors, the sports, just the effect that nature has on people's mental stability and emotional states. That's very important here, and that's very important for us as well,” said Converse. “It's part of the reason that we wanted to live up here and move here. It was because of the capability to do that type of stuff.”
They ended up installing a membrane bioreactor. It’s a water filtration system Converse says is used by dairy farms and New Glarus Brewing, though scaled down for their use. That combined with a UV filter clarifies the wastewater from the brewing process so that it can be reused.
“There's a giant tank in the back, I think it's 1000 gallons that goes in there, and that is reused by all of our hose bibs inside and outside, and that's the water that we use to flush the toilets,” said Converse.
She did make a point to clarify that once that water is used in the toilet, it goes out to the septic.
“There was some confusion initially, and people thought we were making beer with toilet water, which is not the case,” said Converse.
That’s just one way they’re working to make the process more sustainable.
The spent grain has gone to some people locally to feed livestock. There are gardeners that are hoping to get some of it to use as compost come Spring.
The brewing system was also designed to conserve energy where it could as Converse explains during a walkthrough.
“The whole system is heated by steam, which is also more energy efficient than electrical or direct fire systems,” she said.
Brewing Beer
Ahead of opening the brewery, Converse, who already had five years of brewing apprenticeships under her belt, finished the Advance Master Brewers course at the Siebel Institute of Technology’s World Brewing Academy.
“[It was] to kind of hone those skills, figure out the the why behind the how, it's what they always say,” said Converse.
She enjoys the creativity that goes into the recipe building. The Boulder Junction Brewing Company opened with five beers: a grisette, a cream ale, an IPA, an American Red, and a porter. Converse plans to have 12 on tap for this summer.
“The nice thing with brewing, at least for me, is you follow a process,” said Converse. “It's very calming, and in the end, you get a very positive outcome.”
The grand opening was packed with people excited to check out the new space and try the beer.
“I got a lot of, you know, feedback that it was really great. Some people seem surprised that it was really great, which was kind of funny,” Converse said with a laugh. “I don't know why someone would think that we would open a brewery with not good beer.”
“We have people tasting styles of beer that they told us they don't like, and then walking out of here with a growler of it,” said Brown. “That's just testament to like, amazing flavor of beer that Tracy just managed to bring to the table.”
Creating a community space
It’s not just the environment Brown and Converse took thought in conserving when building the Boulder Junction Brewing Company.
While they had to demolish the Blueberry Patch, they preserve pieces of it, like the wooden sign hanging above the brew tanks and the wood from the old building turned into to table and bar tops.
Bits of Boulder Junction history preserved in a place Brown and Converse hope will be a gathering place for the community.
“We really want to become an integral part of this community and have the positive impact, be a social hub and economic hub, and really be someplace that our locals and our seasonal folks alike can come and just commune and be a place for human connection,” said Brown.
And if their first few weeks of business are any indication, they’re well on their way of achieving that.
“To finally crack that first beer and pour that first pint for someone was a huge sort of release,” said Brown. “Then just to see the smiles on everyone's faces… just to hear the conversations and feel the connections, it was absolutely everything we've dreamed of.”
