E-Malt.com News article: USA, NH: Smuttynose Brewery to begin the construction of a new brewery

The moving of an old farmhouse last week on a 14-acre property on Towle Farm Road signaled the official start to the construction of a new $16 mln Smuttynose Brewery and restaurant, Seacostonline.com reported on December, 8.

Smuttynose owner Peter Egelston said the farmhouse is being moved 40 yards east to make room for the new 42,000-square-foot brewing facility. Construction will begin in spring 2012.

“We will be jumping into this full force in the spring time, and we hope to be moving into a new brewery by the summer of 2013,” Egelston said. “What we are doing now is getting a little bit of a head start before the winter sets in, as we all know it will.”

Crews are working this week to jack up the farmhouse, raise it from its foundation and roll it to its new location.

The farmhouse will be placed on a new foundation and later converted into a restaurant. As part of that project, crews also dismantled the connecting structures that tie into the existing farmhouse and a historic barn, which will not be moved.

“We are salvaging as much of those structures as we can,” Egelston said. “One of the structures is a very old carriage house that we would like reassembled sometime in the future.”

The disassembled carriage house will be stored in a dry location until a decision is made on where to place it.

Other work planned this winter includes the construction of a big tank, which will be the centerpiece of an on-site wastewater treatment system.

Egelston said it was important for him to keep the old structures and incorporate them into the new project.

“The easier thing, and probably the cheaper thing, would be to go in there and just tear everything down,” Egelston said.

Egelston said his company is excited to finally start the project. When Smuttynose purchased the property in 2008, financing issues during the height of the recession’s credit crunch led to a major construction delay, pushing back the project to its current status.

Once the project is complete, Smuttynose plans to leave its location in Portsmouth.

Egelston decided to move to Hampton to expand Smuttynose’s operations after failing in previous bids to relocate the brewery to sites in both Portsmouth and Newmarket.

The need to expand, he said, is evident, especially after Smuttynose sold a record number of barrels of beer.

“If you asked me two years ago if we would be selling 40,000 barrels a year by the end of 2011, I would have said no,” Egelston said. “But here we are; we are pretty close.”

Space constraints at its brewing facility in Portsmouth forced the company to shift some of its production of Old Brown Dog ale to a Utica, N.Y., brewer. Egelston said the company plans to bring all its production back to Portsmouth after recently adding new fermentation tanks to its facility.

The new Hampton brewery will allow Smuttynose to double its brewing capacity from 30,000 to 60,000 barrels annually.


14 December, 2011