Worcester Business Journal

Wormtown getting experimental The brewer's Worcester expansion should allow it to meet demand while developing new flavors W ormtown Brewery has increased its out- put 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 expan- sion 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 bot- tling 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 bar- rels 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 cus- tomers, 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 send- ing 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 BY ERIC GOUDREAU Special to the Worcester Business Journal Distributors, a beer distribution busi- ness. That company was sold but still owns the Keene building. While the Worcester expansion allows the company to meet the grow- ing 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 con- cept in front of us that we have never been able to realize." said Ben Roesch, brewmaster at Wormtown. From 2016 to 2017, Wormtown near- ly doubled its output, from 14,500 bar- rels to about 27,000 barrels, as more customers wanted the brewery's prod- ucts 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, attor- ney at Worcester law firm Bowditch and Dewey, which has a division spe- cializing in emerging breweries. The Shrewsbury Street expansion will include: • 2,000 square feet for office and stor- age 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 wbjournal.com | October 2, 2017 | Worcester Business Journal 17 Wormtown's growth Barrels brewed 0 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 2014 2018 2015 2016 2017 35,000* 2,700 7,500 14,800 25,000-27,000, including 700 barrels to Rhode Island *New capacity Source: Wormtown Brewery 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 mak- ing Be Hoppy." Due to its limited size brewery, Wormtown had largely focused on brewing its signature Be Hoppy IPA, but with its new expansion, the beermaker has greater opportunity to play around with different flavors. W P H O T O / E R I C G O U D R E A U

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