Lakeland, Florida-based Brew Hub’s next era has been solidified, several months after news broke that contract brewing company’s facility had been foreclosed by its bank.
Great Southern Copackers has acquired the company and building, and will rebrand it as Great Southern Beverages, co-founder and CEO Jeremy Roberts told Brewbound. Roberts and business partner Andrew Phillippe, who also run Florida-based contract brewery Brew Theory, brought on additional partners to complete the Brew Hub transaction, which had been in the works for nearly 10 months and closed in early May.
Former Brew Hub CEO Tim Schoen will stay on as a shareholder and team member, as will all other Brew Hub employees, Roberts said.
The “beautiful” 75,000 sq. ft. facility is operating near 65% capacity, and volume has doubled since Great Southern got involved, Roberts said.
“It’s very well constructed,” he said. “They did a great job laying it out. There’s a lot of the bells and whistles. The bells and whistles that they didn’t have, we’ve already added to really make it a very high-level facility.”
Great Southern Beverages can produce about 3.5 million cases annually, and nearly all Brew Hub’s clients have stayed on throughout the transition.
Despite volume downturns across beverage-alcohol, Roberts said sales leads for contract brewing and copacking have “been insane.”
“There’s really so much business out there,” he said. “Maybe it’s just the South, because we just have such population growth constantly. And, now that we’re in Lakeland, we’re in a great position logistically. It’s the logistics hub of the state of Florida, so it makes a lot of sense to be there.”
Great Southern’s capabilities run the gamut from beer, flavored malt beverages (FMBs), hard seltzer and spirits-based ready-to-drink (RTD) canned cocktails, to non-alcoholic (NA) offerings, including coffee, tea, soda and energy drinks.
“We’re not pigeon-holed,” Roberts said. “We stay away from dairy, but anything else that goes into a can, we’ve made it at one point or another.
“We can make that pivot,” he continued. “So if beer dips like it has, we’re backfilling immediately. The amount of beverages consumed is always increasing with the growth of the population.”