Buoy Beer Co. is planning for a post-coronavirus future with a dramatic expansion that will double the brewery’s capacity and create a new headquarters for Pilot House Distilling on the Astoria Riverwalk.
Since opening nearly seven years ago in a former Bornstein Seafoods cannery, Buoy Beer has grown to become one of the highest-producing craft breweries in the state. It now rivals Fort George Brewery, the city’s largest beer producer and another quickly growing company expanding into the former Astoria Warehousing campus along the Columbia River.
A rendering of the planned Buoy Beer Co. expansion on the Astoria Riverwalk.
Buoy Beer plans to raise the roof of the former Video Horizons on Astor Street, which hosted a beer hall over the summer, and move in a new 50-barrel brewhouse and fermentation tanks. A warehouse the company owns kitty-corner to the main brewery will be transformed into a new home for Pilot House, a subsidiary of Buoy Beer.
David Kroening, president and general manager of Buoy Beer, said in a press release the expansion is part of a plan to get on track after the pandemic turned the company’s strategic planning on its head.
“We lost a lot of our staff during the first shutdown and had to pump the brakes hard as we dealt with the toughest months we have ever faced,” he said. “After some really hard work from our entire team, we were able to make the decision that with some tweaks to our plan, focusing growth on our core areas was going to be the best path for us to make sure we’d be able to expand our team again into the future and meet the ever-growing demand for our beer and spirits.”
Buoy Beer expects the expansion on Astor Street to double its capacity in the next five years after nearly maxing out production. The new brewery will connect via pipe bridges over the riverwalk to the original brewery, where Buoy Beer plans to install new high-speed canning and keg-filling lines. The original brewery will also add more conditioning tanks for the brewery’s vaunted, slow-fermenting lagers.
“We hope to get production facilities online in the summer of 2021,” Kroening said. “There’s a lot of moving parts, so things will be coming online over the course of a few months.”
Buoy Beer Co. is expanding a brewhouse into the former Video Horizons building and moving Pilot House Distilling to a neighboring building the brewery owns on the Astoria Riverwalk.
Buoy Beer acquired a majority stake in Pilot House last year to capitalize on the growing craft liquor market as craft beer became more competitive. The companies expect co-locating the distillery and brewery will help ramp up Pilot House’s production and improve grain-to-glass fluidity.
Pilot House’s new location will include a 5,000-liter copper still five times larger than what the distillery uses now, along with a fermentation cellar and barrel-aging space. A tasting room and cocktail bar will look out on the 24-foot-tall still through glass walls.
“I am very excited about the opportunity to expand into a state-of-the-art production facility,” Larry Cary, co-founder and head distiller of Pilot House, said. “This will give us the opportunity to compete on a national level by giving us the tools needed to increase our production capacity.”
Buoy Beer has mostly been available throughout much of Oregon and southwest Washington state. The company expects the expansion to double its capacity in the next five years and has started a distribution branch to expand its footprint in Seattle, Olympia, Tacoma and other parts of Washington.
Buoy Beer’s announcement comes shortly after Fort George got permission from the city to start brewing in its new waterfront campus on a larger commercial brewhouse bought from the shuttered BridgePort Brewing in Portland. It hopes to start brewing and canning on the new system early next year.
The city recently classified Fort George and Buoy Beer as industrial wastewater users, blaming their heavier runoff for straining the municipal treatment system. The breweries, hoping to avoid higher charges to discharge wastewater, jointly hired a consultant and devised a plan to divert and store heavier effluent for transport to farms. As part of the expansion, Buoy Beer is planning a new on-site wastewater treatment system.
Buoy Beer Co. is hoping to double its brewing capacity in the next five years.
Future phases of expansion include a second-floor upscale seafood restaurant at Pilot House, a to-go restaurant along the north side of the former Video Horizons and an expanded second-floor restaurant and event space in the original brewery. Buoy Beer also plans several sustainability measures such as rooftop solar arrays, beehives, herb gardens, electrical vehicle charging stations and technology to capture more carbon dioxide from the brewery.
The expansion is being funded by a combination of investors and bank loans. Buoy Beer received a $100,000 grant from the state to upgrade a water line along Astor Street for the expanded campus.
The brewery is also considering an application for short-term membership in the Clatsop Enterprise Zone, which offers property tax breaks for three to five years on new improvements in exchange for investment and job creation. Fort George participated in a longer-term application, promising to invest at least $12.5 million and creating at least 35 high-paying jobs in exchange for 15 years of tax breaks on improvements at the waterfront campus.
Like Fort George, Buoy Beer will also agree to hire first through a pool of local applicants provided by the state Employment Department, said Kevin Leahy, executive director of Clatsop Economic Development Resources and manager of the enterprise zone.
“We are scheduling meetings with the city of Astoria, city of Warrenton and Port of Astoria after the first of the year,” Leahy said. “All four sponsors need to sign off on it.”
December 19, 2020 at 05:30AM
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Buoy Beer plans big waterfront expansion - Daily Astorian
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