Wormtown Brewery to triple its Worcester space
Photo | Courtesy of Wormtown Brewery
Wormtown's new $300,000 canning line will enable the brewer to distribute its beers more efficiently.
Wormtown Brewery has increased its output more than 10 fold since moving from Park Avenue in 2015 to Shrewsbury Street, and this month the Worcester beermaker is set up grow again when its planned expansion comes to fruition.
The company is growing into more space at its 72 Shrewsbury St. location, taking its original 9,000 square feet for a taproom, brewery and administrative offices to add 15,000 square feet for a new $300,000 canning line, new bottling and kegging lines, and six new tanks and fermenters.
The canning line will be the first to be up and running, by mid-October, and the rest will be complete by April. Then, the brewery will have a 35,000-barrel capacity, said David Fields, managing partner at Wormtown. That is a long way from the 2,700 barrels the company brewed in its last year at Park Avenue.
“I'm sure we could grow more, but we want to get a feel for the markets that we have,” Fields said. “We tend to control and limit our growth to about 7,500 barrels, maybe 10,000.”
Rhode Island & New Hampshire
The Shrewsbury Street expansion not only allows the company to provide more services to its Massachusetts customers, but it supports the addition of Rhode Island into its service territory, a move announced in February yielding about 700 barrels sold in 2017.
“This will allow us to get packaged beer to Rhode Island. We are just sending them draft now, but in 2018, this will allow us to get more draft there and bottled beer,” said Wormtown General Manager John Hannafin.
Although the changes won't support it directly, the completion of the Shrewsbury Street expansion comes two months after Wormtown announced plans to open a second brewery and taproom in Keene, N.H. by July.
In order to make the New Hampshire brewery happen, Wormtown Co-founder Tom Oliveri agreed to sell his shares to a group led by Richard and Jay Clarke, former owners of Clarke Distributors, a beer distribution business. That company was sold but still owns the Keene building.
While the Worcester expansion allows the company to meet the growing demand for beers like the signature Be Hoppy IPA, the New Hampshire location is meant to foster creativity and eventually develop new products.
The New Hampshire research will focus on the flavors of northern New England beer, so Wormtown can get a better handle on what customers would want in that region, Fields said.
“We can play around with new agings and new styles,” he said.
Realizing demand
The main expansion in Worcester will allow Wormtown to determine how big it can grow.
“We have never been able to get a handle on what our demand is because we have never been able to brew enough beer in time to actually meet that demand. It's always been this concept in front of us that we have never been able to realize.” said Ben Roesch, brewmaster at Wormtown.
From 2016 to 2017, Wormtown nearly doubled its output, from 14,500 barrels to about 27,000 barrels, as more customers wanted the brewery's products in their stores and restaurants.
“Almost every restaurant you go to in the city has at least one Wormtown brew on tap,” said AiVi Nguyen, attorney at Worcester law firm Bowditch and Dewey, which has a division specializing in emerging breweries.
The Shrewsbury Street expansion will include:
• 2,000 square feet for office and storage space, along with barrel aging;
• 8,500 square feet for a packaging hall with an efficient bottling line, the $300,000 canning line, a kegging line, two 120-barrel fermenters, and four 120-barrel brite tanks;
• 4,500 square feet for fermentation, including an expanding laboratory and quality control space.
“We are constantly reestablishing what the potential is, and what we want to do,” Roesch said. “We excited to get around to experimenting with new flavors that we haven't been able to before because we are so busy making Be Hoppy.”
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