About Us
Bone Up Brewing founders Liz and Jared Kiraly met over a shared love of good beer and heavy metal and have been brewing together ever since. Inspired by the joy of making things by hand, they started the brewery to create a livelihood built off passion and independence. Several year round and seasonal beers are always available, but the small nature of the brewery allows a focus on custom, one-off batches that have a backstory: be it a recipe designed to pair with the music of a local band, a pair of beers brewed for a wedding to represent the happy couple, or a brew made to honor the memory of a beloved past pet, the Bone Up draft list is a representation of the brewers’ lives and the people in the local community.
Bone Up Brewing founders Liz and Jared Kiraly met over a shared love of good beer and heavy metal and have been brewing together ever since. Inspired by the joy of making things by hand, they started the brewery to create a livelihood built off passion and independence. Several year round and seasonal beers are always available, but the small nature of the brewery allows a focus on custom, one-off batches that have a backstory: be it a recipe designed to pair with the music of a local band, a pair of beers brewed for a wedding to represent the happy couple, or a brew made to honor the memory of a beloved past pet, the Bone Up draft list is a representation of the brewers’ lives and the people in the local community.
At its heart, beer is a sociable beverage.
We’ve all bonded with people over beers, and we’ve all heard many an old-timer wax poetic about the loss of the pub as a communal meeting place in town. Hell, our company founders met because of a shared love of good beer (well, beer and heavy metal, but we'll get to that later). But in the last decade or so, we’ve noticed - to our delight - that we're gettin' some of that good old-fashioned sociable beer culture back! And, somewhat unexpectedly, we’ve been finding it tucked away in old industrial parks.
We’ve all bonded with people over beers, and we’ve all heard many an old-timer wax poetic about the loss of the pub as a communal meeting place in town. Hell, our company founders met because of a shared love of good beer (well, beer and heavy metal, but we'll get to that later). But in the last decade or so, we’ve noticed - to our delight - that we're gettin' some of that good old-fashioned sociable beer culture back! And, somewhat unexpectedly, we’ve been finding it tucked away in old industrial parks.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves (where are our manners?). We’re Liz and Jared Kiraly, the founders of Bone Up Brewing Company! We’re a husband and wife team that loves brewing - and drinking - delicious beer. Bone Up is the product of over a decade of constant brewing, near-obsessive research, a slew of jobs in and around the beer industry, a variety of beer travels, and an unfortunate number of people getting cornered into one-sided conversations about things like IBUs versus perceived bitterness, the desirability of isoamyl acetate in Belgian styles, and the inverse relationship between attentuation and flocculation.* Having lived and worked in the Boston area for years, we’re proud to call it home and are thrilled to add our fermentables to our booming beer scene!
*Jared has been described, to his face, as “the Rainman of beer” by a number of people who usually (we think) meant it as some sort of compliment.
And sometimes, you're allowed to simply enjoy it.
We think of ourselves as straightforward, easygoing people and that tends to show through in our beers, hence our slogan: Made From Ingredients. We like beers that are drinkable, unique, and disappear from your glass without you realizing it (I believe the British call that last part moreishness).
And sometimes, you're allowed to simply enjoy it.
We think of ourselves as straightforward, easygoing people and that tends to show through in our beers, hence our slogan: Made From Ingredients. We like beers that are drinkable, unique, and disappear from your glass without you realizing it (I believe the British call that last part moreishness).
The beers we brew celebrate classic American styles while taking inspiration from the Belgian farmhouse tradition:** many are hop forward or new spins on old classics, all fermented with our house yeast blend for added complexity and unique flavor notes. Jared had his moment of beer awakening in Belgium,*** which has had a pretty big influence on how we build recipes - we're all about those bone-dry, super expressive beers; but at the same time, we both strongly prefer to drink local, so most of our day-to-day drinking has stronger roots in American brewing culture. You could call it American brewing with a Belgian accent, if you were so inclined.
**We use this admittedly-sort-of-meaningless phrase because it sounds better than "beer made with grueling physical labor; using unsophisticated, often sort of bad equipment."
***He went to Brussels with the intention of eating waffles for three days straight. After his first sip of a Westmalle Tripel, light shone down from the heavens, angels started singing... yada yada yada now he makes beer.
**We use this admittedly-sort-of-meaningless phrase because it sounds better than "beer made with grueling physical labor; using unsophisticated, often sort of bad equipment."
***He went to Brussels with the intention of eating waffles for three days straight. After his first sip of a Westmalle Tripel, light shone down from the heavens, angels started singing... yada yada yada now he makes beer.
The Journey (Or, if You Prefer, a Saga of Perpetual Production Delays)
In early 2014, our intrepid brewers set about the Boston Area, looking at every suitably-sized industrial/commercial property in search of the one with that "special something" (low rent). After months of searching, some deliberating, some hemming and a little hawing, we found it! Specifically, we found an out-of-use industrial laundromat with a trash-filled dirt parking lot, a surprising lack of interior walls and/or lights, and a back bathroom (complete with shower) with what appeared to be blood on the floor. One look at this obvious set-up to a horror movie and we were smitten. We signed our lease, bought our equipment, and said "we'll probably be open by next summer!"
In early 2014, our intrepid brewers set about the Boston Area, looking at every suitably-sized industrial/commercial property in search of the one with that "special something" (low rent). After months of searching, some deliberating, some hemming and a little hawing, we found it! Specifically, we found an out-of-use industrial laundromat with a trash-filled dirt parking lot, a surprising lack of interior walls and/or lights, and a back bathroom (complete with shower) with what appeared to be blood on the floor. One look at this obvious set-up to a horror movie and we were smitten. We signed our lease, bought our equipment, and said "we'll probably be open by next summer!"
Oh you sweet, sweet fools.
And oh man were we ever wrong about that last part. Summer came and went with maddeningly little progress on buildout, and it wasn't until fall 2015 that we were able to get in there and work our magic. But when we did, we set about that weird lil' space with such a fervor that it's now nigh-unrecognizable when compared to its original self. It was a maelstrom of painting and hammering and swearing and sanding - everything that we could legally build/fabricate/install ourselves, we did: from the lights to the cold room to the floors themselves. And when our own admittedly-limited experience wasn't enough, we set about straining our families' willingness to do us favors - Jared's dad built our bar, Liz's dad and uncle installed our floor, and so on. What I'm saying is - we think of this brewery as an extension of ourselves, and we've busted our collective humps to make it the best we can.
Let's do it ourselves, we said! How hard can it be, we said!
As our own buildout came to a close, and the progress on the exterior of the building sadly remained in the "it'll be done in a month" stage that it had been in for two years, we reached a decision point: brew beer without yet being able to open that taproom that we worked oh-so-hard on, or sit around twiddling our thumbs for an undefined amount of time until everything was Just Right. And we took action! We first fired up our shiny new kettles (well, as shiny as they could be after sitting in an active construction site for eighteen months) in May 2016 and brewed up a series of one-off easy-sippers to kick off our newfound status as a real, actual brewery!
"Made from ingredients in scenic Everett, Massachusetts."
After a whole summer of dialing in our flagships and distributing our beers (sometimes - okay fine, always - by bicycle) around the Boston area, we finally got the go-ahead to open our doors to the public! Since opening the taproom in August 2016, we've brewed over five hundred different recipes, expanded production thrice (going from microscopic to super tiny to regular-ass tiny), established two barrel aging programs (one for regular beers and one for funky/mixed fermentation beers) and made oh so many friends along the way!
Our goal has always been to have jobs we love while creating a sustainable community and a place where people can come, relax, and have fun amongst a variety of beer. We couldn't imagine being happy doing anything else, and we're just glad you're a part of it!
Our goal has always been to have jobs we love while creating a sustainable community and a place where people can come, relax, and have fun amongst a variety of beer. We couldn't imagine being happy doing anything else, and we're just glad you're a part of it!
And since this lil' brewery is pretty much the entire world to us (in a fairly literal sense, not unlike bromeliad frogs or - not to put too fine a point on it - goldfish), we've spent every waking moment trying to think of more ways to cram more fun shit in here! We've got beers and games and casks and snacks and coloring contests and live music and weird niche trivia nights (yes, there are several now) featuring intentionally-terrible prizes and pinball and we even ran a kickball league for a while and sometimes (as in, way more than you might expect) there's cake.
And that's just on a normal day - we're also bustin' our humps tryin' to bring in a buncha cool food vendors to set up popup style and make some tasty treats for you in the taproom, and dang but we've had some good eats up in here!
And that's just on a normal day - we're also bustin' our humps tryin' to bring in a buncha cool food vendors to set up popup style and make some tasty treats for you in the taproom, and dang but we've had some good eats up in here!
And it turns out that havin' a buncha beer and a buncha fun times means that every now and then (i.e. pretty much constantly) we get to meet a buncha cool people and sometimes they also have cool ideas! More to the point, our 3.5 BBL brewhouse makes us the Boston area's smallest brewery (and let's be real, nobody's fighting us for that title, though we do wear it proudly), and that means we can play around with some pretty rad small-batch stuff: we've made beer for weddings and events and charities and tons of local bands and even beers made to honor the memories of dogs that have brightened our lives in the past.
Anyway the point is that we put in a lot of work for a (relatively) small amount of beer, but we like doin' it because beer is fun and we wanna make things that people enjoy. And that hard work does pay off, my friends! In March 2018, we signed a new lease, which doubled our space within the building which means our brewers no longer have to give each other piggy back rides if they wanna accomplish separate tasks at the same time, but more importantly it means we created more of EVERYTHING!
After another year of sawing and hammering and cursing (oh, so much cursing) and visiting the fine folks at city hall multiple times per day, we opened up our expansion in March 2019 with more taproom, more patio, more silly events, more snacks, more beer, more cake, more games, and more elbow room for everyone! Woohoo!
After another year of sawing and hammering and cursing (oh, so much cursing) and visiting the fine folks at city hall multiple times per day, we opened up our expansion in March 2019 with more taproom, more patio, more silly events, more snacks, more beer, more cake, more games, and more elbow room for everyone! Woohoo!
We cruised along and settled into this fine space over the course of that year with a ton o' cool events and beer releases, entering 2020 with starry eyes and big aspirations! But in March, the rug got pulled out from under us. All of us.
But we made the best of it! Despite all the weird/terrible things that happened in 2020, there were also a lot of cool things we managed to accomplish! We started canning (using a mobile canner) and then we pretty quickly graduated to having our own canning line!
Plus, we vastly expanded our outdoor space (what was once an at-best confusing parking lot is now a wonderful beer garden!) and we implemented yet another of Grace's semi-drunken ideas and this time we all got matching-ish tattoos of El Pulpo (the first time we ended up implementing one of her spirited suggestions we ended up starting that kickball league we mentioned earlier) and we started home delivery and vastly expanded the number of stores that carry our beer (from one to "more than one") and we put out a CD and and we were able to brew more beer than ever before and anyway the point is that even when the world is falling apart, we can still do a lot of cool shit and make people happy, which is what it's all about.
But since it only felt like the world was falling apart during all those Covid Times, we've been keepin' on and doin' what we do best through the good times and the bad and what we do best is BEER!
And since the darker days of the Lockdown Era were full of people looking for things to do - either to pass the time, or to try and make up for the fact that their jobs kinda stopped existing for a while, or to try and maintain some shred of sanity (or, in our case, all three) - we ended up doing more collaboration beers with local bands and then other bands heard about what we were doing and they wanted to be a part of it and now it's a Whole Thing and we never really expected this to take off (honestly we thought wedding beers would be our weird niche), but we're completely stoked it has!
And since the darker days of the Lockdown Era were full of people looking for things to do - either to pass the time, or to try and make up for the fact that their jobs kinda stopped existing for a while, or to try and maintain some shred of sanity (or, in our case, all three) - we ended up doing more collaboration beers with local bands and then other bands heard about what we were doing and they wanted to be a part of it and now it's a Whole Thing and we never really expected this to take off (honestly we thought wedding beers would be our weird niche), but we're completely stoked it has!
But makin' cool beers for cool bands is hardly all we've been up to since then - ever since the world started opening back up, our guiding principle has been "let's do more," and do more we did! We've dramatically increased the number of fun events we host at the taproom and now we have a mug club and dog pool parties and comedy shows and marketplaces featuring local artists/vendors and a bunch of people that gather to play fiddles in the taproom and a weekly sushi class and heavy metal yoga and - of course - a pretty strong uptick in the amount of live music we're putting on (usually featuring those cool bands we were just talking about) and a lot of this only ended up being possible because of the beer garden, so that ended up being a pretty interesting silver lining!
And now that we've got a taste for all these cool events (many of which are pretty space-intensive), we've decided to once again demonstrate our own inability to learn from past experience (see previous buildout woes above), which means we're expanding again! After sailing past the initial "your buildout will definitely be done by then" date (September 2021) with more than ample margin for error, we enter 2023 with the hopes that we'll finally be able to have such luxuries as in-unit heated bathrooms, storage for cans that isn't in our creepy lobby, space for live music and/or larger events, and so much more!
So stay tuned for what's next for Bone Up: we update our blog every Wednesday with our latest antics, beer releases, and fun times ahead!
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