Boulevard Brewing Co. Kansas City, Missouri

   If it weren't for Boulevard I probably wouldn't be drinking craft beers today. I can't credit Boulevard for making me a beer drinker, but they've helped shape my opinion of what craft beers should be. I can't say that Boulevard beers are my favorite in any one genre but they always rank pretty high. Maybe it's the home field advantage of being from Kansas City that makes Boulevard constantly good, or maybe they're just really good beers...

    This past weekend I went to the Boulevard brewery in downtown Kansas City. I went with a couple of friends, one of which had been on the tour before. The first thing that struck me was that this was early February and the tour was full. It may not seem surprising that folks will show up for a thirty minute tour in order to get free beer, but unlike other breweries - Boulevard requires that you sign up and book a tour quite a while in advance. For our tour in February, I had to make reservations back in November. I don't think this is a bad thing, the tour is entirely free and the samples are quite generous... it's great that Boulevard tours are in such high demand.

    The Boulevard tour starts with a quick video about who brews the beer and how they do it. It's a low budget presentation starring the actual employees of Boulevard, there was no hired talent here. The best part was the cartoon about the three evil forces which are plotting to spoil your beer. All in all it was pretty informative and not too stale. This was much more enjoyable than the video on the Anheuser-Busch tour which was just a six minute long commercial with quick cuts and exorbitantly high production values. But enough about tour videos...

    The Boulevard tour is pretty small because, well, the Boulevard brewery is pretty small. There are really only two buildings at Boulevard, the old one and the new one. Boulevard's original building, on Southwest Boulevard, is the smaller of the two and houses the old brew house and visitor's bar. The beautiful new brew house is where all the magic happens at Boulevard. The building is only a year or two old and it's spotless, not quite like the super sterile AB buildings though. The new brew house has a really cool lay out, on the bottom floor is where all of the tuns and typical brewery stuff is. Up on the second floor is where the tasting room is. This room is a big, mostly empty room with a long table in the middle. Near the from windowed wall are the tops of the brew kettle, integrated into the floor, with their viewing windows at about waist level. The room looks like it was built to be a restaurant space, not a working brewery.

    It got even better as we headed up to the third floor. This is where the Muehlbach Suite is, atop the new brew house. The Muehlbach Suite is a large space that can be rented out for receptions. There is a nice circular bar in the middle and a long roof-top balcony with benches and fire pits. It was really impressive, there was a great view of downtown Kansas City from the third floor suite. But good beer a Muehbach Suite does not make...

    After the brief tour around the premises we headed back to the cozy visitor's bar in the old brew house and were treated to free samples of Boulevard's beers. The beers they had on tap this weekend were:

• Unfiltered Wheat
• Single Wide IPA
• Pale Ale
• Lunar Ale
• Bully Porter
• Dry Stout
• Irish Ale
• Pilsner

    I'd already had most of the beers that were offered. With the exception of the pales I like most of them, I'm just not a pale ale drinker. Boulevard Wheat is one of the beers that got me in to craft beers so I'll always think fondly of it. The Bully Porter and Dry Stout are both dark beers which I enjoy with a nice heavy meal, unfortunately our tour was midday on a Saturday and I hadn't eaten yet... That doesn't make either one of them any less of a good beer, but I couldn't enjoy them quite as much. The Irish Ale is Boulevard's Saint Patrick's Day seasonal, which I'd not had before. The Irish Ale is pretty similar to an amber ale, which is a style I really like. I'd like to get a couple of the Irish Ales next time a have a piece of grilled chicken and a cup of potato soup. Boulevard's Pilsner is an experimental beer, which is an odd thing to say because pilsners are pretty run-of-the-mill beers, nothing exciting. Boulevard's Pilsner seemed to be just that... a pilsner. It was clear and crisp, which is just about all you can say about a pilsner. I don't know what the point of making the pilsner was, other than to try and rope in more of the 'mass market' beer drinkers. But hey, if it takes Boulevard making a pilsner for more people to appreciate their craft beers then I'm all for it.

    The highlight of the day for me was the Lunar Ale. This is one of Boulevard's year round beers but I'd never had one before. Name's like Zōn and Lunar aren't real descriptive so I never got around to trying either. I figured what better of a place to try the Lunar for the first time than from the tap at the brewery, and I wasn't disappointed. The Lunar is somewhere between a hefeweizen, an Oktoberfest and a Belgian Witt. The Lunar was described to me as a dark wheat, but that doesn't really do it justice at all. The closes relative to the Lunar that I could think of is Schlafly's No. 15 with it's amber color, sweet malty flavor and a hint of tart citrus. I'm eager to taste the Lunar against a No. 15 to see just how similar they are.

    That about sums up our tour of Boulevard. After about 20 collective sampling glasses of beer, a handful of free pretzels with Pale Ale Mustard and a few souvenirs we left with a little more appreciation for this Kansas City original. I look forward to going back to the brewery in the future, hopefully to the Muehlbach Suite.