Lord Hobo Publican Plans Woburn Brewery

A new brewery will open in Woburn soon, and the latest buzz about Lord Hobo Brewing is enough to make you feel a little drunk.

Proprietor Daniel Lanigan, an Everett native who owns the Lord Hobo beer bar and restaurant in Cambridge as well as successful pubs in New York and Baltimore, plans to open the first American craft brewery that makes 10,000 barrels of beer in its first year. (New breweries typically churn out a quarter of that number.)

The 46,000-square-foot space he is converting into the brewery is currently under construction at 5 Draper St., and Lanigan has all the paperwork besides a Certificate of Occupancy from the City of Woburn. Lord Hobo Brewing hopes to begin releasing beer later this year. [UPDATE: An earlier version of this piece ran with an error saying beer would be released next January. Brewery co-owner Steve Garfield set us straight on Twitter.] An active Facebook page shares the development process with eager beer drinkers — plus tantalizing photos of the brews to be.

And for Lanigan, it really is all about the beer. His Cambridge pub features an expertly-curated draft list, and that background gives Lanigan "a pretty good idea of what those best beers are, and I want us to play in the same field," he recently told the Globe. He’s hired a pretty good team: The head brewer is Vince Tursi, most recently of Night Shift Brewing in Everett; cellar operator David Kushner, whose credentials include John Harvard’s Brew House and Harpoon; and brewer-engineer Michael Labbe, who came from Aeronaut in Somerville.

In the early coverage of Lord Hobo Brewing’s to-be-flagship, an India Pale Ale called Boom Sauce, comparisons abound between the world-renowned Heady Topper double IPA from Vermont brewery The Alchemist. Lanigan acknowledges Heady and other great offerings coming from New England but points out that for a variety of reasons, those beers aren’t widely accessible for people who want to try them. With Lord Hobo’s planned capacity, Lanigan aims to fill the void of widely-accessible, world-renowned New England IPAs.

The Globe reports Boom Sauce will be followed by a series of other IPAs, plus a variety of sour beers, saisons, stouts, and more. The brewery will share space with a 4,000-square-foot taproom — with capacity for 400 people — plus retail space, according to Boston Magazine.