Weyerbacher Expansion Should Be Operational By Year’s End & No Plans for Distribution Expansion

We’ve been following along as Weyerbacher & our pal Chris Wilson have worked to expand their facility in Easton.  Now comes word from LVB that the brewery expansion should be complete in late Sept with brewing to being by late Dec 2012.  Also Dan Weirback mentioned that this expansion is intended to better supply their existing 15-state market and NOT to expand their distribution:

Work is progressing on a 7,500-square-foot addition to the Weyerbacher Brewery on Line Street in Easton.  Dan Weirback, president and founder of the brewery, said three of the four walls have been erected and work on the roof has begun in preparation for pouring the concrete floor.

The project began at the end of February and he expects work to be done by the end of September, which is slightly behind schedule. Actual brewing should begin by late December or early January.

“After the building’s done we’ll still have two to three months of outfitting work to do before we actually start using it,” he said.

Weirback said setting up equipment and hooking up the electricity to the system is among the work that won’t start until after the addition is finished.

The expansion will increase the brewery’s space by about 50 percent, according to Weirback. But that additional space will more than triple the output capacity with room for additional fermentation, bottling and kegging.

Currently, the brewery distributes to 15 states and makes just over 9,700 barrels of beer per year. With the added capacity Weirback said they should be able to output more than 30,000 barrels of beer annually.

But he said that doesn’t mean the brewery’s business footprint will be expanding.

“We’re going to stick to the 15 states that we’re in,” he said.

Weirback noted that the added capacity is actually aimed at better meeting the demand for

Weyerbacher beer in the existing territory – demand that he said is going up.