Weathered Ground orders canning line

It won’t be long before folks will be drinking their favorite Weathered Ground brews from 16 oz. cans. Weathered Ground Brewery proprietors Sam and Aryn Fonda today announced the brewery put in its order for a canning line.

“We’re super excited,” Sam says. “It’s been a goal for a long time, and we got the green light to make it happen. The goal is to be canning in June.”

While a few cans may initially hit distribution, most will not. At least for the first period of months, expect most can releases to be brewery-only affairs.

And that’s not all. You can also expect to find some of their small-batch one-off releases and higher ABV brews to be made available in 500 ml bottles. The brewery already secured a small, manual bottling apparatus.

Brewery business manager and co-owner Aryn Fonda says the brewery has been working on getting labels deigned and produced for bottle releases targeted to begin this spring. Aryn says the bottle releases will be held concurrently with special events at the brewery. They do not expect the to put the bottles into distribution.

They say to expect bottle releases to initially be things like Belgian-style saisons, barrel-aged beers, and some high ABV stouts, which will be released in small batches.

As for what’s coming up in cans, Sam says it could be any of his IPAs and even some special, smaller-batch treatments that we haven’t yet seen.

“We sort of have a rotation of IPAs and Double IPAs, so I would like for all of that to be in cans,” Sam said. He expects to take at least a couple of barrels of each batch of IPA he makes and release it in cans.

Some of the initial can releases will also be targeted for beers with an affinity for hot weather. “Who wouldn’t like to have a can of Cool Ridge Lager when lying at the pool or by the river,” Aryn said. They hinted that you may see these kind of canned beers out in a couple of craft beer retailers.

Canning line has big capacity

The canning line equipment is being purchased from Cask Brewing Systems. It is similar to, but an updated version of, the model that Greenbrier Valley Brewing owned before they purchased a higher volume, fully automated system last summer. The Weathered Ground canning line will be semi-automatic and can pump out up to 15 cans per minute. That equals approximately 900 cans per hour, running at maximum efficiency. It seems to have quite a bit more capacity than Weathered Ground will initially utilize, since Sam expects to can only a couple of barrels worth of each beer for his brewery-only releases.

Four-packs of cans could eventually turn up all across the brewery’s distribution markets, but that is more likely to happen sometime down the road. The brewery would first need to invest in more fermentation and conditioning tank space before it could produce enough beer to meet the demand of the distribution market.

Though quantities will initially be limited, this is a big advancement for the brewery, which in the past has only offered its beer in draft. Weathered Ground is opening up a huge new sales channel. National statistics show that 70 percent of beer is sold off the shelf as packaged beer. Only 30 percent is sold as draft.

Weathered Ground Brewery was selected 2018 West Virginia Brewery of the Year largely based on it doing so many things well. The brewery gained a lot of momentum fast from the enthusiasm generated by its IPAs (Haggard, More Haggard Than Haggard, Stop and Smell the Citrus, R.K, Goodness Gracious, More Scrappy Than Scrappy, and Tallahatchie) and stouts (Struggle Street, Bourbon Barrel Aged Struggle Street, BA Ada, Enniskillen, and Summer It All Up). It will become the sixth WV brewery to add canning equipment (not counting Crowler machines).

Weathered Ground Brewery website link