21st Amendment Co-Founder Nico Freccia On The Benefits Of Expanding The Brewery’s Contracting Business.

, 21st Amendment Co-Founder Nico Freccia On The Benefits Of Expanding The Brewery’s Contracting Business.

Nico Freccia Co-Founder/COO, 21st Amendment

On March 7, American Craft Beer published this article 21st Amendment Brewery Starts Contracting Business as Craft Beer Growth Slows which covered the brewery’s recent announcement that it was making its Bay-area brewery and canning operations available to other beverage producers on a contract basis.

In it we explored what the brewery’s decision might be saying about the current state of the of the craft beer business.

Responding to our article, Nico Freccia who founded the 21st Amendment Brewery along with Shaun O’Sullivan in 2000, reached out to American Craft Beer to further share his perspective on the benefits of contracting out their brewing, canning and packaging operations.

And we appreciated that he did…

I just wanted to follow up on the article from Americancraftbeer.com. He makes some excellent points and his first sentence is pretty accurate.

“What does our announcement say about the current state of the craft beer biz? It’s not good.”

Indeed craft beer is going through some pretty big challenges at this particular moment in time. For the first time maybe since the beginning of the craft beer movement, craft beer is seeing a decline in volume growth.

Obviously we, along with many other breweries, have had some significant challenges over the past few years with Covid being the biggest, but on top of that distribution changes and changing consumer tastes. But it is a business, and businesses need to be profitable.

We have been working with co-packers for 15 years now and as you know have brewed for a number of different breweries in our San Leandro facility for the last five years. Taking this next step to make our facility more efficient is the natural next step in the evolution of our business. You learn to pivot and play to your strengths.

I think for me the most exciting thing about this opportunity is that making our facility more efficient and bringing in more capacity to fill our line time will give us the resources that so many small breweries are lacking right now.

It will provide us the freedom to be able to focus on our passions. To focus on what we love to do most and why we love this industry. To continue to develop new, innovative beers. But also to begin to branch out beyond beer and look at non-alcoholic, better for you, and all kinds of other exciting new craft beverages that haven’t even been invented yet.

So to me, our facility, which was forged in the fire of an exploding craft beer boom, is our biggest asset in terms of our ability to continue to grow and flourish. And all of that success simply allows us to continue to focus more on why we got into this business in the first place.

Nico Freccia

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American Craft Beer only wants the best for the nation’s craft brewers and we thank Nico for his thoughtful comments.

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