🔒After tough few years, CT brewers look to rebound in 2023

After a challenging past few years, Connecticut brewers are looking ahead to growth opportunities in 2023.

Higher costs for goods, supply chain issues and an unpredictable retail climate created headwinds for craft breweries in 2022. A carbon dioxide shortage midway through the year forced some breweries to reassess their operations, while others dealt with increasing grain and malt prices that made it more expensive to brew beer.

Still, many of the state’s 120 or so independently-owned craft breweries hope 2023 brings a much-needed recovery to an industry that saw the pandemic sap its strong growth steak.

Connecticut Brewers Guild Interim Director Rachel Diamond, who is head of distribution and brand development at Broken Symmetry Gastro-Brewery in Bethel, said a strong customer base supportive of quality beer will help keep the state’s breweries afloat amid turbulent economic times.

“I truly believe that if you asked any brewery in Connecticut what their ethos is and why they’re here, it’s community,” Diamond said.

2022 supply struggles

While the CO2 shortage got a lot of attention nationally in 2022, most Connecticut breweries were able to cope.

Thomas Hooker Owner Curt Cameron said his brewery currently has a long-term, fixed-price contract with its CO2 supplier. As a result, even though the brewery was notified about supply issues it hasn’t had to make changes yet.

Thomas Hooker has a 20,000-pound CO2 tank, which Cameron said is arguably oversized for the brewery’s current Bloomfield operation, and it gets filled as often as possible.

“We’ve been fortunate that it hasn’t impacted us much — we’ve been notified that there could be shortages, but we haven’t run out yet, which is a positive thing,” Cameron said.

Still, breweries use CO2 for much more than just carbonating drinks.

“You never want beer to touch air” during the brewing and canning process, Cameron said, so tanks and cans are purged with CO2 or another inert gas before beer is added.

“You can’t have oxygen touch beer until it’s finished beer, which means you have to literally fill an entire tank (with CO2) to push all the oxygen out of there,” Diamond said. “It means you’re running CO2 lines a lot and frequently.”

The gas is also used when cleaning kegs, to move canning line hydraulics systems and for other purposes.

“It’s pretty amazing how many things CO2 is used for in the brewery,” Cameron said.

To potentially address a future CO2 shortage, Cameron said his company has explored using nitrogen as a replacement for certain processes. Big breweries put scrubbers on the top of smokestack towers to collect and reuse CO2 that’s a byproduct of brewing, but those systems can cost somewhere around $100,000, Cameron said.

“It just doesn’t make financial sense for a small brewery to employ that sort of technology,” he said.

Hog River Brewing Co. co-owner Ben Braddock said his Hartford-based company hasn’t run out of CO2, but it has experienced price hikes amid a broader shortage.

“We have had to shop vendors because rates have skyrocketed,” said Braddock, who co-owns the brewery with his wife, Joy Braddock. “We actually just got a new bill for this year and it increased by 18%.”

CO2 shortages and price hikes haven’t been craft brewers’ only supply struggles. Braddock said malt prices went up three times in 2022 as did utility costs, including electricity and gas.

“So our beers are getting more expensive to make, and how much can you charge for a pint of beer?” Braddock said.

Labyrinth Brewing Company Owner Adam Delaura said he also experienced higher grain and fuel costs.

“Over 2022 our costs of goods went up double-digit percentages on everything — name a resource that we use and it is way more expensive now than it was before,” Delaura said.

“The economy is a huge factor in our business right now,” added Diamond, of the Brewers Guild.

Delaura said his optimism for a post-pandemic 2022 didn’t pan out, and the taproom business still isn’t what it used to be. The Manchester brewery, located at 148 Forest St., first opened to the public in 2018.

“We started off the year with this cautious optimism … and then it’s like, well it’s more expensive for us, people are spending less money, how do we survive this?” Delaura said.

Braddock said Hog River is still feeling the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as well. He’s seen other businesses in their Park Street building close in recent months, but hopes new streetscape improvements and projects in the area continue to improve Hartford’s Parkville neighborhood.

“It’s been a struggle because many of the office workers haven’t returned downtown to their full work schedules, so that’s had a pretty severe impact on our retail business,” Braddock said. “Our taproom business still has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels.”

Looking ahead

While 2022 offered challenges, craft brewers are more optimistic about the year ahead.

Labyrinth Brewing is finishing up a massive production-capacity expansion, which Delaura said will allow the brewery to at least double the amount of beer it made in 2022. It’s also hired another brewer to help with the process.

The company is also expanding its distribution footprint in 2023, meaning its beers will be on more liquor-store shelves.

Additionally, construction is almost done on a new 700-foot patio that will be ready to debut early this year. A small on-site kitchen could be on the horizon as well, Delaura said.

“There’s definitely still some opportunity in the building. We want to grow into the building as much as we can, and there’s still some space for other things,” Delaura said. “It’s like reenvisioning what our location looks and feels like when you come visit us.”

Braddock said Hog River’s goal is to ride out the inflationary environment over the next several months and hopefully plan for growth in the second half of the year.

“It’s a lot of figuring stuff out right now — navigating and trying to understand where the market and economy is going,” Braddock said.

Hog River has plans to move into the expanding Parkville Market development located across the street from its current Park Street location, according to developer Carlos Mouta, but Braddock declined to comment on those efforts.

Braddock did say the brewery will reopen on Wednesdays in early 2023, and continue to do live music on Fridays. Hog River has also been hosting Social Sundays featuring Black and female-owned small business vendors, which will continue through April. Trivia and bingo are also common taproom events at Hog River, he said.

“Those events seem to bring people into the city, which is nice,” Braddock said.

Diamond said the state’s breweries all have something different to offer, even beyond beer.

“Breweries’ emphasis has always been community,” she said. “Beer is a symbol for that connective tissue that tie people together from all walks of life. We see it in our taprooms, restaurants, package stores, our homes and even in online discussions. That is the reason why beer is ‘recession proof.’ We need those connections. Human civilization was built on it.”