Founders Starts Contract Brewing At Avery

In a sign of one brewery’s success and another brewery’s need to keep its production lines running near full capacity, Founders will begin contract brewing its most successful brand in Colorado next year.

Here’s the deal…

This week Grand Rapid’s Michigan-based Founders Brewing announced that beginning in 2019 it will start contract brewing its All Day IPA at Avery in Boulder Colorado affording its western customers access to even fresher beer.

And while fresher beer will definitely be one of the outcomes of this new arrangement, as Cat Wolinski at VinePair astutely points out, this move signals several things going on just below the surface.

First off, since both Founders and Avery are partially owned by Spanish brewing conglomerate Mahou San Miguel, this new arrangement speaks to the inherent efficiencies that come with becoming part of a larger brewing entity…

AB InBev, which was acquired Chicago-based Goose Island in 2011, now brews their core beers at several of Anheuser-Busch breweries around the nation.

But this announcement also speaks to Founders’ accelerating success and Avery’s struggles…

Founders is hot…Fueled on the enormous popularity of its All Day IPA the brewery grew by 34 percent in 2017.

Avery on the other hand hasn’t been riding the same hot streak.

The Boulder-based heritage brewer moved into a new state-of-the art $27 million brewery with a production capacity of 150,000 barrels per year in 2015 only to watch craft beer’s decade of double-digit growth begin to stall.

And It’s not like Avery isn’t growing.

The brewery grew 16 percent in 2016 but it only reported a 2 percent increase in 2017 according to Good Beer Hunting.

But with Mahou San Miguel now at least partially involved both breweries fortunes…one riding a hot streak and the other with huge production capacity that can be harnessed for the good of all parties involved…Founders announcement this week is far from surprising.