Two weeks ago, we brewed our first batch of beer (Hayburner, of course) at our new production brewery on Oak Street in downtown Buffalo!
We told you a little bit about the history and reasoning behind this new brewery on a blog post that day and promised we’d share a little more about the brewery on canning day, two weeks later. That day is today!
After waiting for years to open a new brewery, it was important to us to be able to scale up our operation quickly. For that reason, we decided to work with equipment vendors we’ve worked with previously, which made the learning curve for making good beer a lot less steep. We went with a 40 barrel brewhouse along with 10 x 80 barrel fermenters from Criveller (in Niagara Falls, Canada). This brewhouse is twice the size of our existing brewery at Huron Street. The current capacity of the new brewery is larger than our existing brewery, and our canning line is faster as well, which means we can immediately more than double our output. All of the equipment we’ve purchased is improved over the equipment we have at Huron Street. These improvements will make our process more efficient, which will give us more beer to sell.
The new production brewery will be responsible for brewing and packaging all of the beer we sell in 12 ounce cans; beginning in August, if you’re drinking one of our beers out of a 12 ounce can, it probably came from Oak Street. Oh, but don’t expect that we’ll only be making the same products you can get from us now – there will definitely be some BIG new packages coming to our portfolio shortly. That’s a hint.
Meanwhile, Huron Street will be brewing and packaging Hayburner in kegs for all the bars and restaurants in the area. Thanks to all of our on-premise customers for the continued support! Huron Street will also be filling our 16 ounce limited release beers, as well as brewing lots and lots of pilot batch beers. There will be all sorts of experimentation happening at Huron Street soon – and perhaps we’ll even be brewing some “beyond” beers as well. That’s another hint.
Another thing NOT to expect – that we’ll only be selling beer in the same places we’ve been selling the past few years. We expanded our sales through the Finger Lakes last year, started selling a lot more beer in Central NY recently, and will be expanding into the Capital Region of NY very shortly. We’ve hired some great new salespeople to help us with this – hi Ben K, Jess B, and Matty J! And that’s just the beginning. For years our customers have been asking us to sell our beer outside of New York state, and we’re finally ready to make it happen – very, very soon.
Perhaps most importantly, a new brewery needs brewers to make the beer, and we’ve hired an incredible collection of amazing brewers who have come to us both from within the brewing industry and from outside of it as well. Many of our existing brewers have been promoted through this process. We’ll even be shutting down 3rd shift (the overnight shift) for the first time since 2016 to focus more on innovation. Congratulations to our entire brewery staff and thank you for working under very stressful conditions over the last several years – we are all looking forward to tasting the beers you make for us!
Big Ditch Brewing Company is super energized for this new brewery and the next phase of our growth. Thanks again to our loyal customers for supporting us for the last 7+ years! We believe deeply in our hearts that Buffalo is the best place to get a beer anywhere in the world and we work hard every day to make you proud. Cheers!