Green Flash Brewing has announced plans for the national rollout of Cellar 3, a series of rare, barrel-aged beers produced in its newly minted second facility of the same name. Located in Poway, Calif., Cellar 3 provides the company with 12,000 sq. ft. of additional room to expand its barrel-aging program and experiment with wild yeast, two endeavors the company’s Mira Mesa facility lacked adequate space for.
Would a Colorado craft brewery ever sell to “big beer?” That’s the question Eric Gorski of the Denver Post posed over the weekend, surveying Colorado brewery owners for their reactions to Anheuser-Busch InBev’s recent craft acquisitions. “There’s a Colorado-sized hole on the growing map of U.S. craft breweries now in the hands of corporate owners,” he wrote. Gorski checked in with a few of the state’s top craft players to get a sense of who might be interested in selling.
One of the world’s preeminent nomad brewers is getting ready to settle down. Mikkel Borg Bjergsø, the Danish beer maker who travels the world producing labels under the Mikkeller brand, has forged a “creative partnership” with San Diego’s AleSmith Brewing that will include an old brewing facility AleSmith had been planning vacate this summer.
Beyond the quality of the liquid inside the bottle, strong packaging and labeling, the eye-catching face of a brand, is becoming paramount as a means of standing out on shelves tasked with propping up more and more craft SKUs than ever before. Or, as Ian McLean, founder and creative director of McLean Design and a BevNET FBU (Food and Beverage University) instructor, said, “If you’re not seen, you don’t exist.”
The executive shuffle continues at Oregon’s Ninkasi Brewing. The company today named current director of business development Per Nielsen as its new vice president of sales. The announcement comes more than one year after Ninkasi parted ways with former national sales director Marty Ochs.
Uinta Brewing today announced expanded distribution throughout Kansas, signing an agreement with the Kansas Craft Alliance, a statewide network of 13 Anheuser-Busch wholesalers. The brewery, headquartered in Salt Lake City, will begin shipping core Uinta offerings like Hop Nosh IPA and Cutthroat Pale Ale to Kansas this week.
Trillium Brewing co-owner Jean-Claude Tetreault is one step closer to realizing his dream of owning a true farmhouse brewery in New England. The Boston-based beermaker today announced plans to expand with a second production facility in Canton, Mass., about 18 miles south of the company’s tiny, 2,300 sq. ft. outpost in the up-and-coming Fort Point neighborhood of Boston.
After a near three-year legal battle, a federal judge has ruled that the founder of a prominent craft beer distributorship in Kentucky owes her cousin, who helped build the business, more than $1 million from the sale of the company. According to a report from Cincinnati.com, U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Gregory Wehrman ruled that Mary Kenney improperly sold the business, Beer House Distributors, to L. Knife & Son in 2011 without first consulting Charles Sisson, her cousin and the company’s only other shareholder.
Another top five craft brewery has found itself embroiled in a trademark dispute. New Belgium Brewing, the country’s fourth-largest craft brewery, recently rolled out its latest year-round offering, Slow Ride Session IPA, without — the brewery says — knowledge that a startup based in Austin, Texas, had recently begun producing a pale ale under the same name.
As both a wink at the past and a nod to the future, Avery Brewing will release “Tectum et Elix” this year which, translated, means “Roofs and Drains.” For 22 years, the brewery has operated out of a disjointed 18,000 sq. ft. facility in a Boulder, Colo. alleyway that lacks proper brewing amenities and has made scaling production nearly impossible.
Diageo, the world’s largest spirits producer and maker of popular import beers like Guinness and Red Stripe, is finally making its foray into craft with the launch of Thump Keg Brewing Co. The spirits-minded beer brand is intended to offer consumers a range of styles brewed using the same base ingredients as its distillery counterparts.
Having reached the 50,000-barrel threshold in just its fourth year of operation, Chicago’s Revolution Brewing is preparing to dig deeper in its home market by expanding its production facility and tripling capacity. Backed by bank and small business loans, the brewery has announced plans to install a 120-barrel brewhouse and several 800-barrel fermenters this summer — boosting capacity to 300,000 barrels — as the company expands into a neighboring space in its current building.
There are two types of malt beverages in Iowa: there’s “beer,” which is defined by the Alcoholic Beverages Division as a product that does not exceed 6.25 percent alcohol by volume (ABV). And then there’s “high alcoholic content beer,” which the state currently defines as malt beverages ranging between 6.25 percent ABV and 15 percent ABV.
Atwater Brewery has some major expansion plans on tap, as the company is building out its staff at its Detroit headquarters while ramping up to build two new facilities in other parts of the country. According to ModeledMedia.com, Atwater is still planning to build a brewery in Austin, Texas, a $15 million project that was first announced last February.
