In what may become a more common move by craft breweries to diversify in a challenging environment, 21st Amendment Brewery in Northern California has announced that they will offer canned beverage co-packing at their 120,000 sq. ft. brewing and packaging facility in San Leandro. As craft breweries adjust to a softening demand in the marketplace, tougher distribution channels and higher costs of production, using their facilities to produce and/or package beverages for other companies could help fill out unused capacity.
According to a company statement, 21st Amendment now has capabilities to make malt or sugar-based alcohol and cider, a Distilled Spirits Permit to make Ready-to-Drink cocktails (RTD’s) and the infrastructure and equipment to produce and package a wide variety of alcohol and non-alcoholic beverages, from beer and N/A beer to FMBs, seltzers, energy drinks, juices and sodas.
The 21st Amendment facility has a high speed (530 cpm) canning line currently running 12, 16 and 19.2 oz. cans and an automated Douglas Spectrum multi-packer cartoner, capable of packing multiple sizes (from 4 to 30 can pack) with a variety-pack spur. As an addition to its packaging capabilities, 21st Amendment is adding a tunnel pasteurizer that will be operational by Q4 of this year. The brewery has a capacity for 300,000 BBLs of annual brewhouse production with a wide range of fermenting and blending tanks from 100 to 500 barrel batch sizes.