Today is the day we are excitedly brewing the first batch of beer at our new production brewery on Oak Street in downtown Buffalo.
(To no one’s surprise, the beer is Hayburner.)
This is a very exciting moment for us. We’ve been limited in production capacity for at least 4 years now. This means that we haven’t been able to make all the beers we want to make or sell beers in all the places we want to sell beer. This also usually means that during the last week of June, right before July 4th, we run out of beer and then spend the rest of the summer catching up. If you’re keeping track – that’s this week. It’s been a really crazy week!
This should be an exciting moment for our readers as well – since you’re about to get more beer from us!
The new brewery has about 20,000 barrels of production capacity. This brewery will more than double our current production capacity. We’ll cover the details of the new brewery and what we’re planning to use it for in another upcoming blog post. In this post, we want to talk about how we got here. Why did we open this brewery?
Let’s go back to 2018. This was our first full year selling beer in cans in both Buffalo and Rochester. We had already been running a three-shift operation for more than two years. Our production volume had doubled the previous three years and in 2018 it grew by another 50%. 2018 was the first year we frequently ran out of beer. We just could not keep up.
This was the year we began to plan out opening a new production brewery.
We spent the balance of that year getting an idea of how big we wanted our brewery to be and roughly outlined the design. Working closely with our co-owner Paul and the team at Iskalo Development (link), a site was identified, and we spent 2019 providing definition around the rough outline of our design. With the design complete and with the site and approvals in-hand, we were looking forward to start building the project in 2020. This culminated in a March 2020 press release announcing our plans to open a Destination brewery at 6700 Transit Road. The plans for this brewery included everything we could have wanted from a production brewery and tap room. We were beyond ecstatic to get started.
Of course, we all knew what came next in 2020. While we remain committed to proceeding with completion of the Transit Road project, as it is an integral part of our long-term plans, it is still delayed until such time as impacts related to the pandemic, such as labor shortages and increases in material costs and availability, subside.
With the Transit Road project “on-hold”, we began considering alternatives to boost our capacity. This process continued through August 2021. During this time, we investigated contract brewing options and purchasing other breweries. Some of you may have even heard rumors about breweries we were thinking about buying. We found that these options were just way too expensive or logistically not feasible. We were frustrated.
Out of these frustrations, however, came a revelation – ”What if we just built another brewery of our own, similarly sized but upgraded, to give us the room to continue to grow while we sort out the Transit Road situation?” We crunched the numbers and found that this was actually the least expensive option that would give us the most capacity and flexibility for growth. Iskalo Development had open warehouse space at 101 Oak Street right down the road (literally four blocks away) from our current facility, which was perfect.
By the end of August, we agreed in principle on the project and announced the plans in December (link).
The project proceeded swiftly, taking a little more than 10 months to complete. We are really happy with the results. As an engineer, I’ve never worked on a project that came together so quickly yet is so well designed. I honestly cannot wait to make beer with this brewery – which is happening as we speak!
Perhaps most importantly, we’ve hired several new brewers to work at the new brewery, and these amazing and talented individuals are going to make our beer better than ever.
The first canning run is in a few weeks. At that time, we’ll share details with you about the new brewery, our new employees, and tease you with some news about what we plan to do with all these new toys. (The equipment, not the brewers, of course…)
Thanks as always for your support in helping us get here. Cheers!
