E-Malt.com News article: USA & Germany: Urban Chestnut Brewing Co. acquires German Bürgerbräu Wolnzach brewery

An upstart St. Louis, Missouri, craft brewer is headed to Germany, a country rich in beer history, to open its third brewery in five years, St. Louis Post Dispatch reported on January 9.

Urban Chestnut Brewing Co. has acquired the Bürgerbräu Wolnzach brewery in Wolnzach, which is about 35 miles north of Munich.

The St. Louis-based company plans to brew small batches of beer at the Bavarian facility in the second quarter of 2015. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Bavaria is the homeland of Urban Chestnut’s co-founder and brewmaster Florian Kuplent, a former Anheuser-Busch brewmaster who started Urban Chestnut with David Wolfe in 2011. Wolnzach, situated in the world’s largest hops producing region, is home to the German Hops Museum.

The Bürgerbräu Wolnzach brewery stopped production about six months ago, and Urban Chestnut seized the opportunity to acquire it, Kuplent said in a phone interview from Germany. Urban Chestnut began expanding sales to Germany in 2013 and has been looking for a brewery there.

“We buy a lot of ingredients from Germany and I go there often to visit my family,” Kuplent said, adding that the timing of the acquisition wasn’t planned. “It happened more quickly than we thought,” he said.

Urban Chestnut has two breweries in St. Louis where it makes Zwickel, Winged Nut, Schnickelfritz and other beers. The company has a brewery at its original location in midtown and it opened early last year a new biergarten and brewery in the Grove entertainment district, which increased its overall brewing capacity to 20,000 barrels annually.

Urban Chestnut also expanded distribution last year to Columbia, Jefferson City and Kansas City.

With the added distribution and new brewery in the Grove, Urban Chestnut increased its beer production from 6,500 barrels in 2013 to 11,000 barrels last year.

The growth primarily came from sales in the St. Louis region, Kuplent said. Urban Chestnut is looking at other areas to grow geographically in the United States.

“We’re looking at a few other markets, but it’s still in the early stages,” he said.

Urban Chestnut’s founders see the new facility as a way to broaden its customer base far beyond its St. Louis roots.

“In considering different ways to grow Urban Chestnut in Germany and in Europe as a whole, we believe the U.S. craft beer model of ‘local’ is a more than viable strategy,” Wolfe said in a statement. “Actually owning and operating a brewery in Bavaria will provide us with a solid platform for growth.”

Some other craft brewers are looking overseas for growth opportunities. San Diego’s Stone Brewing Co. said in July it plans to open a brewery in Berlin in late 2015 or early 2016.

“We’re seeing that with craft brewers being a little bit more mature, they have more of an ability to take on opportunities like this,” said Bart Watson, chief economist for the Brewers Association, a Colorado-based trade group.

Craft brewers — defined by the group as independent and traditional brewers that produce 6 million barrels or less of beer annually — are increasingly expanding their facilities domestically to keep up with demand, he said.

“As the craft beer market becomes more competitive, brewers are going to look for more novel ways to expand distribution instead of more traditional methods,” Watson said. “Foreign beer lovers are hungry for craft beer just like American beer drinkers are.”


14 January, 2015