Craft Beverage Warehouse (CBW), a Milwaukee-based beverage packaging distributor, is making a $4 million investment to begin offering digital can printing to craft beverage companies in 2022.
A new aluminum can making and filling production facility is slated to begin operations in Salt Lake City during the fourth quarter of 2021. Co-packing facility Vobev will launch with a focus on the popular slim (sleek) can production of 12 oz. (355 mL) and 8.4 oz. (250 mL) in a beverage industry crunched by demand and shortages of aluminum receptacle.
New Mexico’s Santa Fe Brewing has placed a renewed focus on “local” to connect with its core consumers in its home market.
Atlanta Brewing Company appointed Alton Shields as the Georgia craft brewery’s new president and general manager last month.
Great Lakes Brewing, the 35-year-old Ohio craft brewery, recently underwent a self-reflection: “How do we continue to attract new consumers, when many of today’s drinkers were in diapers at our brewery’s founding?”
Ball Corporation, the world’s largest manufacturer of aluminum beverage cans, will continue to allocate inventory to customers and import cans from overseas due to short supply throughout this summer, executive vice president and chief financial officer Scott C. Morrison said yesterday during a public session of the Deutsche Bank Global Basic Materials Conference. “In the Northern Hemisphere, both in Europe and U.S. we’ll be on allocation again this summer,” he said. “We’re coming into this summer in North America extremely tight on inventory.”
The strains on the packaging supply chain that supports the beer industry are showing no sign of letting up. Demand for aluminum cans has far outpaced supply as at-home consumption spiked with the pandemic-forced closure of the on-premise channel last year, and that same rise in home use has also driven up the cost of cardboard packaging.
Brewers Association chief economist Bart Watson explored why draft beer sales have yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels in his latest members’ only analysis.
Iron Heart Canning has added new warehouses in Chicago and Springfield, Massachusetts, bringing its total number of warehouses to 25 throughout New England, the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, and Midwest.
New Orleans-based Dixie Beer shocked the South last summer when it announced it would change its name amid the social justice protests that followed George Floyd’s murder. Nine months after that announcement and four months after the company revealed it would become Faubourg Brewing Company, the first Faubourg branded beer will begin rolling out of the 114-year-old company’s brewery.
The Brewers Association (BA) is urging the Can Manufacturing Institute (CMI) to ensure that small and independent craft brewers have access to aluminum cans amid the years-long inventory crunch beverage producers are now facing. In a letter to the CMI, BA president and CEO Bob Pease painted a dire picture for the nation’s nearly 8,400 craft brewers. “These businesses will simply not survive that long without cans,” he wrote.
San Francisco-based Anchor Brewing opted to give itself a makeover as a 125th birthday gift. Ballast Point has revealed new packaging art that has already begun rolling out to retailers. Granbury, Texas-based Revolver Brewing will roll out new artwork for its core offerings this spring. Anheuser-Busch InBev-owned Blue Point Brewing debuted a new logo and branding that will replace art that the Patchogue, New York-based craft brewery has been using for four years.
Can inventory nationwide has tightened, due to the seismic shift in beer sales from on-premise draft to off-premise package since the COVID-19 pandemic began. “Sixteen ounce cans are going to be a problem this summer,” David Racino, co-founder and CEO of Austin, Texas-based American Canning, told Brewbound.
Dixie Brewery owner Gayle Benson announced the company will change the name of the New Orleans-based craft brewery to one that does not reference the Confederacy. The new name has yet to be selected.
