BKS Artisan Ales is expanding while holding tight to its small-batch roots

When it comes to craft brews, BKS Artisan Ales in Brookside has been a go-to brewery for the metro’s beer nerds. You know the type: the folks who observe a cold one’s foam height and then swirl the glass to release “volatile compounds.”

Since opening their neighborhood brewery in 2017, Brian and Mary Rooney have deliberately taken a small-batch mentality to their beers, churning out as many as four to five batches a week while constantly fine-tuning those recipes. Almost a decade later, the brewery’s success has led to another taproom opening in the Crossroads and two gold medals in the World Beer Cup competition.

Over the years, Kansas City magazine’s coverage of BKS hasn’t hesitated to call the brewery “the top of the heap.” However, when a small-scale brewery enters a new chapter of growth, it begs the question: Can a brewery built for beer nerds scale up without sacrificing the things those nerds obsess over?

As I sit with Brian, Mary and their pup Pivo (after whom they named their monthly lager series) on the brewery’s Brookside patio, our conversation begins with the most obvious topic: hops. The couple tells me about the two farms on New Zealand’s South Island they’ve been sourcing Rakau hops from (about a thousand pounds a year) and how the hops lend a “dank edge” to their gold medal-winning session IPA, Which Way. It seems craft-beer lovers have little to worry about. For BKS, growth has just meant more resources to indulge the same obsessive attention to detail that defined its early years.

“We started with one of the crappiest brewing systems on planet Earth that a brewery could ever have,” Brian says. “Everything we did was painstakingly, terribly slow, hard to do and complicated. But all the painstaking effort we went into in the early years gave us the capacity or credibility to invest in the future.”

One of the biggest game changers for the brewery came in 2021, when BKS bought its own canning line. Say you’re sipping a glass of BKS’ German-style Keller pilsner or maybe a hazy double IPA (which, I have it on the Ronneys’ authority, has not gone out of style, no matter what other folks in the industry might be saying) and decide to take a can home. The beer you drink at home should taste nearly identical to the one you had on draft. For those of us more concerned with drinking the beer than dissecting it, that might sound obvious, but the experience of drinking a beer from a can versus a draft pour can be surprisingly different. The canning line helps eliminate dissolved oxygen, preserving the beer’s quality from the brewery to your fridge.

“The technology that we’re using for our canning process is state of the art,” Brian says. “For a small brewery like us, it’s pretty uncommon to have equipment like that.”

The canning line also makes a huge difference when it comes to dropping off beers to be judged for competitions, and I imagine there’s no coincidence between the purchase of the canning line and the brewery’s 2021 Great American Beer Festival win, when it took home a silver for Clouds, a double hazy IPA.

One of the couple’s next goals is to turn the refrigerated to-go cans section into more of a shopping experience for customers by “[creating] the visual intrigue that matches what’s inside the can,” Brian says. That means working with local artists to create labels and stocking up so searching for the right beer feels like your own personal liquor store.

No matter the growth, the goal for Brian and Mary has always remained the same: make good beer. While large-scale brewers might make a single batch of beer once or twice a year, BKS’ small-batch approach means making more batches more often. And with each batch comes another opportunity to tweak, taste and fine-tune the recipe.

Take their other gold medal-winning beer from this year’s World Beer Cup competition, the Westland. The New Zealand-style IPA had been entered into competitions before and would make it past the first rounds of voting but never quite make it to the final rounds. The Rooneys kept tweaking everything from the water profile and malt to the hops combinations and, perhaps most unpredictably, the yeast. Brian compares yeast to a cat. “It will do whatever it wants to do, but you have to know how to get your cat to do what you want to do, and we’ve become really good at that.” Eventually, they got it right—and the Westland became a winner.

The Crossroads location, which opened in December of last year, is an opportunity to serve the award-winning beers to a different part of the metro in a different way, too. Once a month, the Crossroads site serves a Kölsch-style ale service, a style of serving Kölsch that is unique to Cologne, Germany. The Kölsch-style ale is served in its own type of small glassware in a traditional kranz tray. Every Wednesday, you can snag a two-dollar Kölsch in that specialty glassware. At Brian’s recommendation, “drink them cold and fast.”

Turns out, there may be no contradiction between getting bigger and getting nerdier. For BKS, growth has meant better equipment, more room to experiment and more opportunities to obsess over the minutiae that can turn a good beer into a great one. Nearly a decade in, the brewery may be getting bigger, but it’s still sweating the same small stuff.

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