The legendary Greg Engert’s tailored line of style-forward beers is the year’s most exciting debut.
by Kate Parham
You may find yourself lost in a dish of fall-off-the-bone-tender short ribs with buttered turnips, but look up from your plate for the real wow moment: There’s a soaring, custom-designed brewery hulking above. Three elevated mezzanines complete with a whopping 19 fermentation vessels (including a rare barrel coolship) float overhead in this 1918 boilermaker factory turned restaurant, bar and brewery.
Though the building’s old, everything about Bluejacket—the brainchild of Greg Engert, D.C.’s famous beer visionary, cask ale advocate and beer director for craft meccas Vermillion, ChurchKey and Birch & Barley—is groundbreaking. The 7,300-sq.-ft. Navy Yard brewery is the only place in the District you can go to the source and taste dozens of small-production, exclusive brews.
Engert and brewer Megan Parisi launched no fewer than 20 collaboration brews before the doors opened in October, working with the likes of Devils Backbone, Oxbow Brewery, Lost Rhino, Brussels’ Brasserie De la Senne and Belgium’s De Struise Brouwers—standouts include Snack Attack, an imperial porter brewed with Cigar City and Funky Buddha that’s candy-delicious with salted caramel, cocoa nib and honey-roasted-peanut flavors, and L’Intérimaire, a collaboration with Dogfish Head highlighting verjus rouge, the juice of unripened wine grapes. Going forward, the duo’s beer program is one of the most ambitious in the country: They’re reviving lost styles, toying with culinary beers and sours, and exercising patience with wood-aged brews napping in nearly 70 unique oak barrels (from bourbon to rum to wine). And by incorporating a brewing lab, all 20 house taps (including five casks) will have the fingerprint of an original house yeast.
Bluejacket’s elevated tavern fare holds court with the pints: A whole-animal focus drives chefs Kyle Bailey and Tiffany MacIsaac’s dishes like jerk-fried pig tails and grilled pastrami tongue, though classics like house-ground burgers get new life with tangy manchego, picked red peppers, arugula and housemade harissa mayo. The menu’s designed to flatter the beer, new batches of which pop up almost daily. Anywhere else, so much beer (and food to match!) would be over-zealous, but for Engert, constantly pushing perfection is the norm.
