Recently, Victory Brewing announced that Old Horizontal, their 10.5 percent barleywine wouldn’t be reaching market in 2011.
Founder Bill Covaleski told Brewbound that the decision was somewhat bittersweet.
“It’s one of those unfortunate situations where we have to make decisions to keep everything flowing at the rate it needs to be,” he said.
Covaleski said that sales are up 40 percent over last year and that brewing Old Horizontal would have slowed down production time for their core brands.
“It’s very time consuming to produce since we can only take the first runnings of our wort,” he said.
And unfortunately, it looks as if the beer won’t make a return until Victory is able to expand.
“It’s unlikely that it will make it back until we can add to our brewing capacity,” said Covaleski.
As far as a timetable for growth, Covaleski said expansion could happen as early as 2013. The brewery is currently on pace to ship 82,000 barrels this year, compared to just 58,850 a year ago.
“I don’t like to let our customers down,” said Covaleski. “We run the risk of upsetting our customers and there are people out there that love Old Horizontal that just won’t be able to get it this year.”
Covaleski also commented on their recent announcement to cease production of Dark Intrigue after this year.
“That one is a strategic retirement,” he said. “That was an experiment we wanted to try and now we are going to apply our skills and our brewing capacity to developing a new beer.”
Total capacity in the Victory brewhouse is 120,000 barrels.
Covaleski also noted that the most recent addition to their core lineup, Headwater Pale Ale, currently accounts for 12.3 percent of the core brand sales. That beer was introduced less than 8 months ago.