SweetWater Brewing celebrated its 25th anniversary Feb. 19.
The company first opened on Fulton Industrial Boulevard in 1997, then, in 2003, moved to Ottley Drive in Brookwood Hills, where it has continued to grow.
SweetWater ranks 11th among craft breweries in U.S., based on beer sales, according to the Brewers Association.
Aphria Inc., a global cannabis company headquartered in Canada, acquired SweetWater in late 2020. Since then, there’s been rapid expansion, including the addition of the Green Flash and Alpine beer brands, made at SweetWater’s newly opened brewery in Colorado. There’s also a new West Coast distributor, Reyes Beer Division.
Recently, I caught up with SweetWater founder and CEO Freddy Bensch, who discussed some of the new developments.
“After 25 years of being in business, we finally embarked on opening up the rest of the country,” he said. “We didn’t want to do that from Atlanta, for a number of reasons — obviously, economics from the shipping side. But, also, from the environmental side, we wanted to create a facility closer to the West Coast.”
When SweetWater acquired Red Truck Beer Co. in Fort Collins, it also hired much of the team that had been working there. “It really felt good, and almost emulated what we’ve got in Atlanta,” Bensch said, “with the team, with the layout, and just the whole vibe. Now, we are shipping our first beers from that facility to California, and we’re introducing the SweetWater brand to the West Coast.”
As for the Green Flash and Alpine additions, Bensch called them “phenomenal brands,” but said that “over the past five or six years, they’ve not been well taken care of. The opportunity came to bring them in, and nurture them, and hopefully see them flourish. And, going into California and the West Coast, the timing couldn’t have been better. It immediately gave us traction with those brands, and our new West Coast wholesaler.”
For now, Green Flash and Alpine beers will be brewed in Fort Collins, but SweetWater hopes to acquire a brewery in California that’s the right size for producing those brands.
Asked for his take on 25 years of SweetWater, Bensch said he’s focused on looking to the future. “For us, it’s never been about looking back,” he said. “It’s always been about moving forward, and what’s next. To hit 25 years does make you take a pause, and look in the mirror and say, ‘We’ve been doing this a long time.’ But, it doesn’t feel like 25 years. It feels like we’ve been doing this for five or six years.”
Of course, like every other business, SweetWater has had to deal with the pandemic, but Bensch believes the company “did a pretty good job navigating it.”
“I would say these last couple of years with COVID made it go even faster,” he said. “It took everything we knew, and all the experiences we’d had from the previous 23 years, and kind of threw them out the window. It was almost like a new startup, except, you already had this giant business, with a lot of commitments and plans and investments. So, you put a couple breaths in your life vest, and you hoped you floated through this thing alright.”
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