Two recent events make it unclear where Granville Island Brewing’s future beer production and bottling will take place.
Not only is the company’s main production facility going to move, its bottling facility has also changed ownership, stirring up more potential instability.
The 31-year-old beer brand is largely perceived to be a small craft brewer because of its origins as a small-batch brewery based on Granville Island.
Steady growth, however, attracted Andrew Peller Wines to buy the venture in 2005. Peller then flipped the company to one of the world’s largest brewers, Molson Coors in 2009.
Molson Coors had bought Ontario’s Creemore Springs Brewery several years earlier and chose that division to be Granville Island Brewing’s official parent.
Granville Island Brewing continues to operate a brewery on Granville Island although only specialty beers sold in larger, 650-millilitre bottles are produced on that site.
The majority of the more than 7.5 million litres of beer that Granville Island Brewing produces annually is brewed at the nearby Molson Brewery on Burrard Street — the largest brewery in Western Canada.
Molson announced last year that it planned to phase out making beer on the site and then, earlier this month, announced that it had sold the three-hectare site.
Molson plans to open a new brewery somewhere in B.C. in the next three to five years.
Molson does not bottle Granville Island Brewing’s beer at its Burrard Street brewery.
Granville Island Brewing, instead, bottles its beer on Annacis Island at the Turning Point Brewery, which the Mark Anthony Group sold Nov. 10 in a US$350 million mega-deal that also included it selling its Palm Bay pre-mixed drink brand and the Mike’s Hard Lemonade brand in Canada to Anheuser-Busch InBev-owned Labatt Breweries of Canada.
With Turning Point Brewery now the property of the world’s largest brewer, it is an open question how long the company will bottle beer for smaller competitors.
No one from Granville Island was available to comment on this story.
Instead, a company representative emailed a statement to say “there are no changes planned at this point.”
Turning Point Brewing spokeswoman Briar Wells said in an email that it will be “business as usual.”
Granville Island Brewing generated $22,831,746 in revenue in 2014, according to the British Columbia Liquor Distribution Branch (BCLDB).
The company ranked, by revenue, as the fifth largest seller of beer within B.C. that year.
Bigger beer sellers in B.C. include the top-ranked Molson Coors Canada Vancouver Brewery, Labatt Breweries of Canada (No. 2), Okanagan Spring Brewery (No. 3) and Pacific Western Brewing Co. (No. 4).
Each of those top five beer sellers saw revenue from B.C. sales fall in 2014.
Granville Island Brewing’s 3.25 per cent sales decline in 2014 was the smallest percentage decline among the top five brewers.
Independently owned Phillips Brewing, which ranked as the No. 6 seller of beer in B.C., oversaw an 18.47 per cent revenue increase to $17,209,987 in 2014.
gkorstrom@biv.com
@GlenKorstrom
For business news go to biv.com
