Another regional brewery is joining the ranks of those who are canning craft beer. Harpoon Brewery is canning two of their beers, the I.P.A. and the Summer Beer.
From the press release:
The Harpoon Brewery is pleased to announce that your backpack will be a little easier to carry on hiking trips this summer; introducing Harpoon IPA and Harpoon Summer Beer in cans. Just in time for Memorial Day weekend, the Harpoon Brewery will offer its flagship India Pale Ale and seasonal Summer Beer in 12-ounce aluminum cans. The beer, which was brewed at Harpoon’s Windsor, VT brewery, is being canned at FX Matt in Utica, NY today. The new cans will enable New England craft beer lovers to enjoy Harpoon beers during summer activities and at locales where glass bottles are not convenient.
It’s interesting to see more larger craft breweries turn to cans these days. I’m guessing we’ll see more and more of this size brewery adding cans to their line-up.
Very nice cans!!
I think the most interesting thing about this deal is a craft brewery shipping finished beer in bulk to another brewer for “canning”. This opens up a lot of new potential packages for smaller brewers (and avoids the sigma of “contract brewed”) and I can’t think of it happening in the US before in recent times- other than when Matt themselves recently shipped beer (Utica Club, I guess) to Genesee in Rochester for canning after the fire destroyed the canning line in Utica.
Coors used to (still does?) ship “high gravity” beer to VA. for mixing and packaging, Schlitz used to ship wort to Primo for fermenting/packaging in Hawaii and IIRC A-B even bottled bulk shipped Wurzburger in the US, but this seems to be the first time a craft brewery’s done it with finished beer to be put in cans. Seems like the new canning lines in Latrobe (and, I think, Wilkes-Barre is supposed to get one, too?) along with the other “old line” breweries still running cans (Genesee, Minhas, City, others?) could get some new business if this proves cost effective.