News

College City Beverage was thrilled to welcome Greg Koch (pronounced “cook”) to Minnesota recently. You can read the first blog about his visit here, where he discusses Stone’s history and success. Now, you can read our transcript from Greg’s discussion about Stone’s expansion into Richmond, Virginia:
Richmond is in full swing. We’re building a beautiful 220,000 square foot building. It’s a 250 barrel brewhouse, and it’s my understanding that it’s the largest craft beer brewhouse on the east coast. The walls are up, and we’ve just done some absolutely massive–I mean 300 truck–cement pours.
So–what does that mean to you [the distributor]? Well, it means greater and continued growing brand awareness. We now have another place for people to come visit and to experience Stone beers. But, most importantly, it means we’ll be able to improve the quality, freshness, and consistency of our delivery–you’ll be able to better get the beer you want when you want it. We will continue to support you better than we have in the past,–even if that past has been pretty damn good, which is what we try to do.
The new facility will also take the pressure off Escondido (our current production facility). That will then allow us to become more nimble with our existing special releases and other time-sensitive things. Now, we’re working toward boiling down our own processes in the facility. We used to brew beer specifically for a special release and come out with it a month later, and that’s when the marketplace and our wholesaler would know. We would just call and say, “Hey, this is going in the truck!” We had no annual business plan, and we had some modest hits and some near misses with our seasonal releases, but now we are honing it in. Now, we trial the beer months in advance, and we dial it in, like we did with the new seasonal release “Thunderstruck.”
To read more about Stone Brewing’s expansion to Virginia, read their interviews with Richmond BizSense and Stone’s Blog.