E-Malt.com News article: USA: New Belgium Brewing's new plant adds capacity

The Fort Collins brewery, the third-largest craft brewer in the United States, also is giving new meaning to green beer, with "environmentally aware" practices such as using wind power and solar lighting, Denver Post published June 19.

These are heady days in the craft-brew industry, and New Belgium Brewing Co. is taking advantage with a new bottling plant that almost doubles capacity.

The Fort Collins-based brewer began bottling beer on the new high-tech line three weeks ago and will hold a ribbon- cutting for the facility Thursday.

The $26 million, 55,000-square-foot bottling and packaging facility can fill and cap 700 bottles a minute and produce up to 850,000 barrels a year.

New Belgium, which was the first U.S. brewery to buy all its electricity from wind power, has made a name for itself by utilizing environmentally friendly technologies.

The new bottling plant also uses green technology.

Skylights, solar tubes and windows serve as the primary light sources for daytime illumination. Lighting controls optimize the use of high-efficiency lights. Water used to rinse the insides of bottles is reused.

The cooling system doesn't contain freon, and cooling towers use technology to treat water without chemicals.

"They are environmentally aware, and that mirrors what their consumers feel as well. It is actually a good marketing piece," said Harry Schumacher, editor of trade publication Beer Business Daily.

New Belgium is the third-largest craft brewer in the country, after Boston Beer Co. and Sierra Nevada Brewing.

The beermaker sold 437,400 barrels and experienced 18 percent growth last year. It is expecting as much as 12 percent growth this year.

The company, best known for its Fat Tire Amber Ale, will add Minnesota and Iowa to its distribution list this summer, making it available in 18 states, said New Belgium spokesman Bryan Simpson.

Fat Tire is one of the hottest beer brands in the country and has assumed cult status in some places, said Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association, a Boulder-based trade group.

"This new bottling house will allow them to satisfy a little more demand and open up some new markets in the Northeast, which is what they have been thinking about," Gatza said.

Other craft brewers also have been expanding.

Denver's Flying Dog paid $1.4 million to buy a brewery in Frederick, Md., out of receivership last year, bringing the company closer to Northeastern markets, and Boulder-based Avery Brewing Co. spent $1 million for a new bottling line.

Consumers have been drawn to craft beers even as demand for beer from industry heavyweights Anheuser-Busch, Mil ler and Molson Coors has languished.

Small regional brewers throughout the country saw 12 percent growth in 2006. But they remember sales surging before falling flat in the late 1990s, a bust that drove some out of business, Gatza said.

Yet most craft brewers have cause for optimism, Gatza said.

In the 1990s, "the industry overheated and was seen as a can't-miss business opportunity so all this easy money rolled in for new brands which didn't have the foundation and quality," he said. "...You haven't lasted to this point if you aren't making a great beer."


20 June, 2007