Broken Bat Brewing back in rotation in time for Drink Brew City Week.
Steam, water destroyed nearly everything inside
“It was as bad as you could imagine,” said Tim Pauly.
Pauly and Dan McElwee, owners of Broken Bat Brewing, 231 E. Buffalo St., put their brewery on the disabled list on May 15 after steam and water damaged everything in the Historic Third Ward business except the stainless steel brewing equipment.
Broken Bat will come back into the rotation at noon on Friday, in time for Drink Brew City Week, a celebration of Milwaukee’s craft breweries organized and sponsored by the Milwaukee Craft Brewery League. Broken Bat will open with new beers — a coconut porter, a Scotch ale and a barleywine — and the familiar Straight Ahead Chedd apricot pale ale and Ugly Finer Northeast-style IPA.
The brewery also will be the first stop of five for the Drink Brew City Keg Killer Pub Crawl on Friday.
A steam pipe used to heat the brewery equipment exploded into the unit, circulating scalding steam through the brewery and taproom, melting glassware and televisions and destroying everything from the point-of-sale equipment to the table tops. Two picture win-
dows blew out from the temperature and pressure. The toilets tipped over and shattered. The cooler out back caved in on itself, Pauly said.
The steam also set off the brewery’s sprinkler system, which washed five to six inches of water throughout the brewery. Anything that wasn’t melted was destroyed by water.
The only survivors were the tanks used for brewing and 10,000 pounds of grain on a rack in the vault, a periwinkle feature of the building Pauly and McElwee pointed out when they started the brewery.
The damage was enough that crews had to take the taproom down to the studs and rebuild. Friends, family and customers helped replace the 1,800 baseball cards on the wall of the men’s room. Replacement photos from the 1940s All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which inspired the movie “A League of Their Own,” are in transit, Pauly said.
Among the losses was an estimated 1,100 gallons, or five full batches, of beer. Also lost were two bourbon barrels that were aging stout. Pauly and McElwee continue to monitor and save two brandy barrels aging barleywine.
When the brewery reopens on Friday, there will be 12 tap lines instead of just eight and the Coconut Porter will be available on nitro. Broken Bat also will serve Nitro Cold Coffee, which the brewery continues to brew for Two Brothers Beverage Co.
The patio upstairs, which the owners had planned to open for Memorial Day, will be in place. So will the canning line.
“It was truly 400 degrees down here,” said Pauly, who waded through a mess that was once the taproom that he and McElwee spent months putting together on their own.
Pauly stood among boxes that included new tap handles, televisions, merchandise (the paint on the T-shirts melted and the brims on the Broken Bat baseball caps deformed in the heat).
The glassware, the keg cleaner, the barstools and tables are in place. There’s a new dartboard. New artwork for the walls. New plumbing you won’t see.
Grab a beer. Plop it down. That’s a new coaster.