It was right around Memorial Day when we ran out of beer.

We became aware of this trend as early as December of last year. Based on the success of our tap room, and primarily our flagship IPA Hayburner on draft lines around the city, we were growing faster than we had originally planned to grow. By the time we won the TAP NY award for “Best Craft Brewery in New York State”, we knew that we would need to make more beer than we were capable of. And, by Memorial Day, we were all out.

Let’s back up a bit.

Even before we opened our brewery, there were three parts to our long term plan:

1) Make great beer

2) Serve it in a comfortable and appealing tap room (our factory showroom so to speak)

3) Distribute in bottles or cans all over Western New York

And so, we had always planned to expand the brewery in order to put the beer on shelves in supermarkets and retail stores. Just not this quickly.

There were a number of questions we had to answer immediately.

First question: bottles or cans?

In a sentence: cans have a story.

Cans completely protect beer from light exposure. All things being equal, the seam between the can and the can lid does a better job of keeping out oxygen than a bottle cap does. Cans are more accessible for outdoor drinking at parks and beaches, and easier to transport as well. Cans are lighter than bottles, and thus cost less to transport, both filled and unfilled.

And finally, cans are just cool right now. Probably because of all the stuff above. But also, they’re just cool.

So, we began the work of scoping our new brewing equipment – 6 x 60 barrel fermenters would effectively triple our capacity and give us some room to breathe.