E-Malt.com News article: USA, KY: Lexington Brewing Co. to expand

When Alltech purchased the Lexington Brewing Company in 1999, the Kentucky Ale it produced was used mostly as a promotional item to be handed out at corporate events, according to Hal Gervis, global operations manager for Alltech’s Lexington Brewing and Distilling Co.

That has changed. Their beer is now available in 13 states; Alberta, Canada; Ireland; and in Beijing and Shanghai, and the company is in the process of shifting much of its production from its cramped brewery to the former Kentucky Eagle distribution facility.

On May 11, they released their newest beer, an India Pale Ale (IPA).

The IPA will be Alltech’s first canned beer, to be followed closely by a rebranded Kentucky Kölsch, currently called Kentucky Light. The IPA will be sold in four-packs of 16-ounce cans, as well as limited bottles. The Kölsch will also be sold in the pint-sized aluminum cans.

The IPA will join the Light/Kölsch, Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale, Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Stout and the original, Kentucky Ale, in the group’s full-time line-up of products.

Since starting off with Kentucky Ale, Gervis and Nathan Canavera, beer and spirits brand manager, said the tastes of the public have evolved from “the yellow fizzy water.”

And, that is one of the reasons the company is rebranding the Kölsch.

The IPA and Kölsch will be available thanks to the addition of a canning line that has recently been installed at the company’s facility on Angliana, part of a $20 mln investment. In addition to cans, soon the beer will be placed in kegs on Angliana as beer is trucked from the Cross St. brewery, and in increasing amounts, brewed on site. By this time next year, Gervis said the company will have a new bottling line operating on Angliana, too, as the vintage bottler on Cross Street will be decommissioned. That brewery will be scaled back to small amounts to demonstrate the brewing process for those on tours of the adjacent Town Branch Distillery.

While the production continues to expand, as do its distribution territories, Canavera said the Lexington Brewing and Distilling Co. is not a major player on the national beer market.

“The best-known craft breweries in the country you can think of off the top of your head, New Belgium who makes Fat Tire or Sierra Nevada, those guys are over a million barrels [of beer produced per year], and last year we did 30,000,” he said. “We feel big here in our hometown, but when I step foot in the Great American Beer Fest, we’re a small fish.”

But Gervis said while the Angliana expansion phases in, the company is soon to lose one aspect of being a small fish as an improvement will be made to its existing bottling line on Cross Street in advance of the new one being in place on Angliana. New labelers will be added, which will keep the paper labels from peeling off bottles, or at least make them harder to peel off on their own.
exciting.

“It’s like the old days again.”


15 May, 2013