Crane Brewing of Raytown goes beyond the pale ale

The Kansas City area’s newest buzzworthy brewery is in an industrial park in Raytown.

The drive to Crane Brewing takes about 17 minutes from downtown Kansas City. The white cinder-block building is just south of Raytown’s quaint downtown, past a lawnmower shop and a Chinese restaurant called Shanghai Express. Getting there requires a bumpy drive down a dead-end gravel road.

Crane Brewing is literally off the beaten path, but so is its beer. The brewery specializes in European-style saisons and sour beers, two styles that are quickly gaining popularity among Americans looking beyond the pale ale.

The brewery is the latest in a string of KC-area beer companies founded by homebrewers. But unlike breweries such as Cinder Block Brewery or Kansas City Bier Co., Crane Brewing skipped opening a taproom and went straight to distribution. Its first four beers — Saison, Farmhouse IPA, Orange Gose and Apricot Weiss — are now available in stores and bars on both sides of the state line in Kansas City.

Founder Michael Crane says turning his passion for beer into a career is a dream come true. But it hasn’t been easy. “We started without any money, any investors,” he says. “We started with my homebrew, in my basement.”

Getting to this point, Crane says, “has been quite a roller coaster ride.”

A brewing passion

Michael Crane’s homebrewing habit started in 2009, when he bought a Mr. Beer kit at Target for $15.

Crane, then 54, started with basic beer recipes. He didn’t drink much, so he gave batches to his adult sons Joey and Jonathan. It wasn’t long before the design engineer’s hobby turned into an obsession. His Leawood basement became a laboratory where he milled grain, boiled wort and stored wild yeast he harvested from pears, blueberries and wildflowers.

His craziest experiment was a beet beer he made by infusing Berliner Weisse with sliced, boiled beets. The magenta brew with a head of hot pink foam became legendary among Kansas City-area homebrewers, who crowded around Crane for samples before the 2013 KC Nanobrew Festival opened to the public.

Crane started entering and winning homebrewing contests. His fellow homebrewers urged him to consider opening a brewery. So did Jon Poteet, vice president of marketing for Central States Beverage Co., a KC-based distributor.

“I’m too old to start over again,” Crane told Randy Strange, a geologist he’d been homebrewing with.

“Nah, you’re not too old,” Strange told Crane. “I’ll do all the physical work.”

As his brewing hobby bubbled over, Crane’s career fell flat. For 22 years, he had designed furniture for classrooms and retail stores and manufactured it at his Raytown-based company, Funblock. But in late 2013, one of Funblock’s biggest clients outsourced its furniture manufacturing to China. The loss was impossible to overcome.

In 2014, Crane reconsidered the brewery idea. He had a building in Raytown that was nearly paid off, an interested distributor and award-winning beer recipes. What he didn’t have was the energy or the will to start and run a company by himself.

“I was at a point where I was done with that,” Crane says. “I wanted to be in a position where I could do something I was passionate about but not have to make every decision.”

Assembling the team

In early 2014, Crane connected with another homebrewer who wanted to turn his hobby into a career.

Chris Meyers worked at a veterinary clinic and had a degree in biology but dreamed of opening a brewery. Meyers had already assembled a small team that included brewer Steve Hood, who previously worked at Boulevard Brewing Co., and Aaron Bryant, a homebrewer and chemical engineer.

Meyers, Hood and Bryant considered launching a taproom brewery in Lee’s Summit. But after meeting with Crane and Strange, the five men decided to join forces. They started brewing together on Sundays in Crane’s basement.

Crane Brewing officially debuted in April 2014 at the Parkville Microbrew Fest, one of the largest and longest-running local beer festivals. The team was overwhelmed by the response — more than 200 people stood in line to try the homebrews — but the day ended in disaster.

As the men were loading up to leave, the nob of a five-pound carbon dioxide canister came loose and the canister shot like a rocket into Crane’s left arm, shattering his elbow. Surgery repaired the broken bones, but Crane still deals with limited mobility and constant pain.

“I just keep my hand in my pocket a lot,” he says. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

As Crane recovered, the team moved forward with the brewery. They brought on Jason Louk, Crane’s longtime accountant, to help write a business plan and pull in investors. Louk says he saw Crane Brewing as a start-up company with the potential to grow big, fast.

“After that first festival, all the distributors in town were approaching us,” Louk says.

The team had a distribution deal with Central States before it had a working brewery, which helped attract investors. So did buzz surrounding its beer.

John Couture, who owns Bier Station in Waldo, says his employees and customers have been talking about Crane Brewing beers since the craft beer bar opened in 2012.

“I heard rumblings about these amazing beers you could only get at festivals,” Couture says. “It was word of mouth through the beer geek community.”

Building the brewery

The team spent most of 2015 turning Funblock’s former building into a brewery.

They all pitched in on demolition, drywall, paint and plumbing, and by summertime, the cavernous space started to fill up with shiny stainless steel fermentors, beer tanks and bottling equipment.

The brewers paid for the equipment and renovations with $1 million from investors and a small business loan. Construction costs quickly ate into that money.

“Every time we tried to plan on how much something was going to cost,” Hood says, “it was more expensive.”

In the spring, Crane Brewing launched a fundraising campaign on crowdbrewed.com, a sort of Kickstarter for breweries. They asked supporters for $40,000 that would help fund their barrel-aging program and buy equipment that Hood could use to test for wild yeast or bacteria such as lactobacillus.

Lactobacillus, which gives yogurt its tang, is a necessary ingredient in Apricot Weiss and Orange Gose. But trace amounts of the bacteria could botch a batch of Saison or Farmhouse IPA.

The fundraising campaign was a success: It raised more than $45,000 from 296 backers.

Crane Brewing also found support in the city of Raytown, which embraced the brewery from day one.

Raytown public information officer Brenda Gustafson says the city worked with the brewery to figure out how to get a liquor license, recycle water and dispose of spent grain. Gustafson also rallied the community behind Crane and his team.

She says the response from Raytown residents has been “nothing but positive. They recognize that this is a jewel within our downtown.”

In September, the brewery helped organize a new Raytown beer fest called Festival of the Lost Township. The event featured more than 30 breweries, a handful of local distillers and a VIP tent with food made by a group of top Kansas City chefs that included Crane Brewing supporters Celina Tio of Julian and The Belfry and Jason Craine of Charisse.

More than 600 people attended the beer festival, and tickets to the VIP tent sold out. Gustafson and the Crane Brewing team is already planning this year’s festival, set for Sept. 17.

Brewing problems

The team originally planned to start distributing beer in the fall. What they didn’t anticipate is how long label approval would take.

After Crane Brewing’s first four labels were approved at the federal level — that process takes 30 days — the brewery had to submit the labels for approval in Kansas and Missouri. In Kansas, Louk says, breweries can submit labels online, and sometimes they’re approved the same day.

“The issue is, in Missouri, label approval is still in the Stone Age,” Louk says. “You print everything on paper, mail it in and wait for someone to look at it. That could take up to six weeks.”

The team started brewing in September. In December, while they were still waiting on label approval in Missouri, they launched distribution in Kansas.

In mid-December, Meyers doled out samples of Crane Brewing beer at On the Rocks, a liquor store in Lawrence. He looked tired but relieved to finally be pouring beer. After sampling all four, sour beer fan Jill Koehler of Lawrence decided to buy a bottle of Orange Gose, a tart German-style beer brewed with orange zest and salt.

“I really like the sourness of it,” Koehler says. “It’s very drinkable.”

Crane Brewing’s tart beers also appeal to cocktail and wine drinkers, says Josh Eans, chef/owner at Happy Gillis and Columbus Park Ramen Shop in Kansas City.

Eans, who supported Crane Brewing’s Crowdbrewed campaign, plans to toast the brewery with a sold-out beer dinner at Happy Gillis on Wednesday.

“I think they’re filling a good niche as far as what KC beer drinkers want,” he says.

Building a brand

Finding a niche is very important for new breweries in Kansas City, says Bryce Schaffter, founder of Cinder Block Brewery in North Kansas City.

“As the beer scene grows, if people don’t have some level of focus and really become the best in that niche, you’ll see breweries struggle,” Schaffter says. “I think Crane has carved out a spot for the saison and the sour.”

But Crane isn’t the only KC brewery producing those styles.

Torn Label Brewing Co. makes a dry-hopped sour beer called Tongue-Lash, and Martin City Brewing Co. experiments with barrel-aged saisons. Boulevard introduced tart styles to mainstream drinkers with its Tell-Tale Tart and Hibiscus Gose beers.

“And we can thank Boulevard Tank 7 (Farmhouse Ale) for making the saison accessible in this market,” Strange says.

But it takes years — decades even — for a brewery to build a brand like Boulevard’s, says Central State’s Poteet.

“The fun part,” Poteet says, “is taking (Crane Brewing) beers beyond a very passionate small community. Helping them become everyday beers you see at Price Chopper and Lukas Liquor.”

Skipping shortcuts

Price could be an obstacle for some beer drinkers. Crane Brewing’s 750-milliliter beer bottles typically range in price from $9.99 to $10.99, but future barrel-aged releases could cost between $13 and $30. Those prices reflect the time and effort it takes to brew the beers.

For example, to make Orange Gose, brewers hand-zest 500 oranges instead of using orange extract, which would be cheaper and faster. Crane also skips artificial carbonation in favor of bottle conditioning, a time-consuming process that allows the yeast to naturally carbonate the beer after fermentation.

Brewing will become even more complicated when Crane Brewing starts to work with wild yeast — which, true to its name, can be harder to manage than domesticated yeast — and barrel-aging, which takes months.

In coming months, the brewery plans to release Grapefruit Gose, Tea Weiss brewed with berry rooibos tea from Hugo Tea Co., and, in the fall, Beet Weiss.

Hood is helping Crane scale up his recipe, which originally called for 10 pounds of beets. They’re thinking 350 pounds should do the trick.

“It’s a good thing that the other guys are a lot younger than me,” says Crane, who has his homebrewing equipment and a pegboard filled with tools set up in a corner of the brewery. Currently, he’s tinkering with a pilot batch of beer brewed with wild yeast harvested from a friend’s apple tree.

“He has very eccentric ideas,” says Bryant, who sees beer as more of a science than an art. “I kind of let Michael do his own thing.”

Michael Crane’s pilot batches will eventually be available in Crane Brewing’s taproom, which is being built with revenue from beer sales. Meyers envisions reclaimed wood on the bar, a garage door that opens up on nice days, maybe even a rooftop deck. But first, they’ll need to pour sidewalks and pave the parking lot.

Crane, now 60, says launching the brewery reminds him of being a new parent.

“You have all this anticipation, all these plans,” he says. “When the baby comes, it’s really great. But that’s when the work really starts.”

This story was originally published January 26, 2016 at 2:40 AM with the headline "Crane Brewing of Raytown goes beyond the pale ale."