As we enter our 5th year of covering the rapidly evolving craft beer business, we thought it was time to hit the refresh button and give our website a facelift. With the newly redesigned Brewbound, our goal is to improve the reader experience and deliver a news platform more in line with our maturing brand, our core values and our growing audience. That means a website that peels back some of the unnecessary layers and places a greater emphasis on compelling and engaging news content.
Featured in this week’s edition of press clips: Boston Magazine suggests craft is moving on without Jim Koch; NPR tackles trend of trademark disputes; Gary Fish, Widmer Brothers opine on the state of the industry and New England Brewing apologizes for ‘Gandhi-Bot.’
To welcome the New Year, Oskar Blues will expand distribution throughout a number of untapped markets in both the Midwest and Northeast. The brewery began shipping its products this week from its flagship facility in Longmont, Colo. to Iowa, Nebraska and downstate Illinois. The brewery will also soon send beer from its second facility in Brevard, N.C. for distribution throughout Maine and Vermont.
Georgia’s craft brewers may have found a couple of allies in the state house. The Georgia Craft Brewers Guild has secured five sponsors for a bill that, if passed, would repeal a number of restrictive, Prohibition-era regulations. Guild members contend that current state laws are stifling the growth of the craft sector and, in an effort to help educate legislators, the guild recently hired Thrash-Haliburton to lobby on behalf of the state’s growing craft beer industry.
We’re less than 48 hours into 2015 and already a pair of legislative initiatives that would impact how craft beer is sold at supermarket stores is grabbing headlines. In Wisconsin and Colorado, grocery advocates are lobbying for changes that would allow supermarket chains greater flexibility when selling beer.
2014 was by far the most successful year in Brewbound’s short, four-year history. Readership is at an all-time high and attendance at our annual business conferences is growing faster than ever. As we look for ways to improve our daily coverage of the craft beer industry, we’re asking readers to share their thoughts on our reporting in 2014 and help shape Brewbound’s content in 2015.
Surly Brewing’s new $34 million facility in Minneapolis will be fully operational within a couple weeks, pending the installation of its packaging equipment, according to a report from MPR News. The facility, the article adds, will enable the Minnesota-based brewery to quadruple capacity from 42,000 barrels per year. Additionally, the new brewery will feature a restaurant that has room for 90 people, a main beer hall that seats 216 more, and an event center.
2014 was another banner year for craft beer. Now, with the pages of our calendar set to flip to 2015, we take a look back at the years most important — and most read – stories in craft beer. Here are the top 10 stories that the defined craft beer industry in 2014.
Central States Beverage Co. has announced year-end sales of 1 million cases of Boulevard beers throughout the greater Kansas City area alone, the most ever by one of the brewery’s distributors in one year. The MillerCoors-affiliated wholesaler has more than doubled sales of the Boulevard brand since first acquiring it in 2007, when it launched with sales of 497,000 cases. In 2013, Central States fell just 40,000 cases short of the 1 million case benchmark.
One truth made abundantly clear in 2014: Not all cash is created equal. On one side of the equation sit companies like Founders (Mich.), 10 Barrel (Ore.), and Blue Point (NY), all of which were bought out by larger, international beer companies. While those three brands will now be able to use the money and the distribution reach of their new investors and owners to grow, there’s a definitional downside: they’ve left the ranks of the craft realm.
There is little doubt that most beer salesmen would consider a job heading up sales for Dogfish Head to be one of the most coveted positions in craft. And there was a time when Adam Lambert, the man who held that position, VP of Sales, until the end of November, would have agreed. Brewbound recently discussed his decision to leave Dogfish Head, the keys to becoming a successful beer salesman, and what he hopes to accomplish at New Holland Brewing.
Brewers Association chief economist Bart Watson checked in with Yahoo Finance yesterday, providing a small snapshot of craft beer’s growth in 2014. In a video interview with multimedia correspondent Akiko Fujita, Watson said shared updated figures on the amount of craft breweries currently operating throughout the U.S. The latest number? 3,250.
Bell’s Brewery has issued a voluntary recall of its beer, Mercury: The Winged Messenger, in 43 Michigan counties, citing a glass defect on the lip of certain bottles, which could cause small pieces to become dislodged. The recall, according to a statement from the company, applies only to bottles purchased in specific counties in its home state of Michigan, “not the entire packaging run.”
As Brewbound prepares to go on a brief hiatus for the holiday season, we thought we’d feature some exciting collaboration news from two of the country’s fastest-growing craft breweries. Oregon’s Ninkasi Brewing and Virginia’s Devils Backbone have partnered to create an imperial dark rye beer that Ninkasi’s founding brewmaster Jamie Floyd describes as “unlike anything we’ve ever brewed before.”
