Posted in Beer News

Megan Parisi Named Head Brewer Of New D.C. Brewery

Megan Parisi, former lead brewing at Cambridge Brewing in Massachussettts has been named lead brewer at Neighborhood Restaurant Group. NRG is a serious of restaurant groups in the D.C., Maryland, Virginia area.  Restaruants include Birch & Barley, Church Key, Star Catering, Rustico and more.

 Recently, the group announced the addition of a brewery being built at The Yards, right next to Nationals baseball park.   The brewery will focus on barrel aged sour beers, and will use it’s own coolship.

PR Director Paul Engert: 

Parisi’s experience at Cambridge, Engert adds, made her an ideal fit for Neighborhood Restaurant Group’s new venture. “The thing that stood out to me,” he says, “was that this wasn’t just somebody who was a great brewer of classic English pale ales or something. This is a brewery really known for innovation, barrel-aging, strange ingredient usage and things like that, all the things that we want to make a hallmark.”

Engert emphasizes that barrel-aged sour beers – much like Belgium’s tangy lambic beers – will be a major focus at the brewery, which is installing an old-school coolship, a large shallow pan used to cool unfermented beer and expose it to ambient wild yeasts and bacteria. (Undesirable in most brewing settings, these microbes produce sour beer’s characteristic funk.) Non-sour beers will also be aged in barrels formerly used to store bourbon, rum and “crazy stuff” that isn’t the norm at most breweries, like gin, or barrels made from unusual kinds of wood. “We want to see what actually happens when we use acacia versus new American oak,” Engert says.

[WaPo]

pic via Ladies Of Craft Beer