MIT Brewers Take Flight with Aeronaut Brewery

Aeronaut Brewery officially opens its doors and pours pints of its latest 12 drafts for all to try on June 21. Started by MIT PhD students Ronn Friedlander and Ben Holmes, Yale PhD student Steve Reilly, and computer scientist Daniel Rassi, the brewery is located a couple miles from MIT in a 12,000 square-foot warehouse in Union Square, Somerville.

What began as a passionate weekend hobby among roommates—all four still live together in Somerville—formalized when the roommates purchased several hefty pieces of brewing equipment and transported them up from Florida and New York. With the help of MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service and connections with both the StartLabs and Media Lab, Aeronaut has since taken shape. Several MIT professors are even investors.

And that unique name? “The name captures a lot of qualities that we think are important like experimentation, adventure, curiosity, and sort of enjoying the ride,” says Friedlander. To date they have nearly 50 separate batches of beer in process and prototyped a system that scales down the brewing experience, allowing for more improvisation in the brews they serve.

All of this feeds into the broader culture of experimentation that pervades Aeronaut. They cultivate their own unique strains of yeast through both farm house brewing—or using yeast from air—and other techniques like collecting samples of yeast grown from water with bread flour or moss picked up on a hike. Frequent experiments also involve terroir—or how a beer’s regional ingredients affect taste.

They have even tried making two batches of the exact same beer with different yeasts. The result? Two completely different tasting beers. “From a scientific perspective you are changing one variable,” said Friedlander. “You can get some interesting results and actually draw conclusions from them.”

During events leading up to this week’s opening, Aeronaut has partnered with the nearby community to test out new brews and teach beer making. During the Cambridge Science Festival, Aeronaut demonstrated the process of making a beer they dubbed the Scifest Sour. Attendees were alerted to the Sour’s fermentation with emails such as “Looks like the kolsch yeast is very active and bubbling away in the five-gallon batch.”

Aeronaut also teamed up with Groundwork Somerville to brew a maple brown ale for the organization’s annual maple syrup boil. They replaced the water typically used in brewing with maple sap.

The brewery doubles as a communal work space for other food and fermentation startups. “We want to be a place where people grow out of MIT and grow into careers,” said Holmes. “We’re trying to create an innovative environment where innovation can be powered by commercial.”

When asked whether there was any truth to rumors that Aeronaut was the subject of a new Mark Wahlberg reality show on beer-brewing MIT graduate students, Holmes and Friedlander declined to comment. But perhaps something’s brewing.

Aeronaut is located at 14 Tyler Street in Somerville. Visit Aeronaut’s website for details on this week’s events and register for the grand opening celebration.