Better Together: Why Craft Breweries Are Sharing Taprooms and Brewing Systems

Since founding Primitive Beer in Longmont, Colo., in 2017, Brandon and Lisa Boldt have worn every conceivable hat. The spontaneous-fermentation specialists handle brewing, blending, bottling, sales, marketing, and staffing their taproom — all while parenting a young daughter.

“Our work-life balance has been terrible,” Brandon Boldt says, adding that the family-run brewery has no outside employees. As the couple planned to have another child, they weighed their options for continuing production of lambic-style beer. “We were wasting resources, both temporally as well as fiscally, running a tasting room,” Boldt says.

Last November, the couple shuttered their Longmont operation and relocated to New Image Brewing’s production facility in Wheat Ridge, Colo. Primitive shares New Image’s brewing equipment, stores its barrels inside the building, and hosts a monthly pop-up for bottle sales and serving beer.

“I now have a semblance of a life,” Boldt says. “The hope is that sharing that space can be mutually beneficial.” (New Image also produces beer for TRVE Brewing, which shut down its production facility earlier this year.)

Craft breweries bloomed, and boomed, by providing drinkers with unique tastes and senses of place. Upstart breweries filled warehouses and former factories with gleaming brew kettles, proof that beer was made right here, by friendly neighborhood folks, not like those commodity lagers made elsewhere anonymously. As demand for craft beer spiked throughout the 2010s, breweries expanded to slake drinkers’ seemingly endless thirst for IPAs.

“We all just ramped up production and bought tanks,” says Kieran Farrell, an owner and director of operations of Gun Hill Brewing, which opened in New York City in 2014. “In hindsight it was a mistake.”

As demand for craft beer ebbs while the costs of doing business increase, breweries are overhauling their business models by offloading production equipment, closing locations, and sharing production equipment, ingredient orders, and even sales and marketing duties with fellow breweries.

Sharing Brewing Equipment and Resources Can Boost the Bottom Line

Building a brewery is not for the faint of funds. As an alternative, fledgling brands can embrace contract brewing, enlisting another brewery to bring beers to cold, fizzy reality on its own equipment.

Brewers choosing that path often faced beer-geek wrath, especially during the 2010s boom that brought brew kettles to cities far and wide. “Contract brewing was demonized,” says Teo Hunter, a cofounder of Crowns & Hops, a Black-owned brewery in Inglewood, Calif., that began in 2019.

“It’s deeper than just us having a contract brewing relationship. We’re able to collectively understand that opportunity and chart a course toward combined success.”

But in such a capital-intensive industry, contract brewing still proved the best path to entry. Hunter and fellow founder Beny Ashburn centered Crowns & Hops on culture, aligning the brewery with hip-hop and HBCUs, inviting drinkers of color to enjoy an IPA. “That was our very best opportunity for success in an industry that was really struggling with diversity,” Hunter says.

According to the National Black Brewers Association, America still only counts 86 Black-owned breweries, including just 12 with their own production facilities. Access to means of production remains a challenge. This spring, Crowns & Hops banded together with fellow Black-owned brewery Full Circle Brewing in Fresno, Calif., to form the Circle of Crowns Beverage Group. The alliance streamlines operations and lets the breweries strategize together and share strengths.

“It’s deeper than just us having a contract brewing relationship,” Hunter says. “We’re able to collectively understand that opportunity and chart a course toward combined success.”

Matt Malloy understands sharing resources better than most brewery owners. He was previously head of marketing at Zipcar, the car-sharing network, and later cofounded Boston’s Dorchester Brewing. Dorchester began in 2016 as a contract brewery, making beer for brands such as Evil Twin, and it buys bulk ingredients to help partner breweries achieve greater economies of scale. (Dorchester now produces its own beers, too.)

Many partner breweries work with Dorchester to produce high-volume beers, reserving smaller-batch experiments for taprooms. “It’s a hybrid approach,” says Malloy, the CEO.

Last December, Dorchester merged with Aeronaut Brewing of Somerville, Mass., to create the Tasty Liquid Alliance. Aeronaut will phase out its production facility and consolidate manufacturing at Dorchester (it will still produce small-batch beers in Somerville), and the TLA umbrella is big enough to welcome additional breweries or beverage companies.

“At the end of the day, we are a multi-legged stool,” Malloy says. “We have to get clever in this space.”

One challenge breweries face is excess capacity. They can brew more beer than they make, leaving expensive equipment underutilized. During a presentation at this year’s Craft Brewers Conference, Bart Watson, the chief economist for the Brewers Association, announced that craft breweries nationwide only use about half their potential production capacity, a problem compounded by declining growth.

Selling equipment and rightsizing production is a smart move at the moment. This year, Gun Hill shut down production in the Bronx and began making its beers at Vosburgh Brewing in Elizaville, N.Y., where Farrell is also an owner and director of operations. Gun Hill brewed 30-barrel batches in the Bronx. At Vosburgh, it produces 10-barrel batches to supply key accounts and seek smart growth.

“We’re going to brew what we need and keep our distribution tight,” Farrell says.

In particular, small regional and midsize breweries that might produce between 5,000 and 25,000 barrels per year are caught in the middle of a difficult market. “As things become more challenging, we need to be more efficient,” says Kevin DeLange, the co-owner of Dry Dock Brewing, which opened in Aurora, Colo., in 2005, and sits in that numerical middle ground.

After talking to friends at fellow regional Great Divide Brewing, which opened in Denver in 1994, “we realized that both of our facilities had enough capacity to make all the beer that we both needed,” Delange says, adding that the breweries share a Colorado distributor.

“We wouldn’t have access to 50 percent of the people walking through the door, but we’d be shouldering 100 percent of the cost.”

Because Great Divide had a newer packaging line, Dry Dock closed its facility last year and relocated production to Denver. (Some Dry Dock staffers moved over to Great Divide’s facility.) Now the sales team sells both brands, shipped on the same trucks, Dry Dock’s Apricot Blonde sitting beside Great Divide’s Titan IPA.

Freed from the daily demands of running a production facility, DeLange has been getting back into brewing and recipe development and working in the Brew Hut, the homebrew shop where Dry Dock began.

“As we got bigger and bigger, I was in meetings all the time, so now I can talk to customers again,” he says. “It’s been such a joy.”

Co-Branded Taprooms Can Bring in New Customers

Beyond infrastructure, sharing a taproom can help brands court new customers. In Seattle, Bale Breaker Brewing and Yonder Cider have a co-branded space where IPAs and dry ciders are served side by side and in mixed flights. Collaborating with a brewery helps “introduce cider to a bigger group,” Yonder founder Caitlin Braam has said.

Last year, Lost Abbey entered an alternating proprietorship to produce beer at Mother Earth Brew Co.’s facility in Vista, Calif. The breweries then teamed up on a combined taproom, sharing buildout costs for the space that opened in March. “It made a lot of sense because we’re already roommates,” says Mother Earth partner and director of marketing Kamron Khannakhjavani.

“We try to do one new beer every week now, and we have the tank space to achieve that.”

A pessimist might feel that the breweries are also sharing a customer base, “but the advantages far outweigh any disadvantages,” Khannakhjavani says. A Lost Abbey fan might be inclined to try a Mother Earth beer, and vice versa. “We wouldn’t have access to 50 percent of the people walking through the door, but we’d be shouldering 100 percent of the cost.”

The biggest obstacle is that the government requires each brewery to have separate point-of-sale systems. Taproom signage prepares people to open multiple tabs, and customers have been accepting. The proof is in the receipts: Since opening in March, the breweries have paid off the initial taproom investment. “You can’t ask for more than that,” Khannakhjavani says.

In life and in business, cohabitating can be problematic. Zac Ross started Marlowe Artisanal Ales in 2019 while working as head brewer at Twelve Percent Beer Project, a contract brewer and distributor in North Haven, Conn. “I felt I was struggling for tank space,” says Ross, who decided to open his own brewery in Nyack, N.Y., in 2022.

But the space, which formerly housed another brewery, did not work out. In 2023, Ross pivoted to Mamaroneck, N.Y., taking over the Decadent Ales space and partnering with Barclay Brewing. The breweries also created a collaborative brand, New York Craft Coalition, that doubled as the business name.

“We found people to be more confused than enthused,” Ross says, adding that decorating the taproom was tricky. “It’s difficult to put up one brand’s artwork when you have two brands under the same roof.”

In April, Marlowe Artisanal Ales took over New York Craft Coalition and overhauled the space. Now the taproom, restaurant, and beers are all beneath the Marlowe banner, no constraints. “We try to do one new beer every week now, and we have the tank space to achieve that,” Ross says.

The days of easy money in craft beer are as long gone as lines for fresh 4-packs. Surviving and thriving requires constant adaptations — THC drinks! Hop waters! — and sharing resources, as well as a realization that owning a brew kettle or retail space isn’t all-important.

Relinquishing the Longmont location gives Primitive Beer’s Boldt and his wife time and space to assess as the brewing industry evolves to meet drinkers’ restless desires. “It’ll be exciting to watch, but not feel like we have to follow in anyone else’s footsteps or feel the pressures of those changing trends,” he says.

The article Better Together: Why Craft Breweries Are Sharing Taprooms and Brewing Systems appeared first on VinePair.