Why Craft Breweries Are Sharing Taprooms and Brewing Systems | VinePair

Craft breweries bloomed, and boomed, by providing drinkers with unique tastes and senses of place. Upstart breweries filled warehouses and former factories with gleaming brew kettles, proof that beer was made right here, by friendly neighborhood folks, not like those commodity lagers made elsewhere anonymously. As demand for craft beer spiked throughout the 2010s, breweries expanded to slake drinkers’ seemingly endless thirst for IPAs.

“We all just ramped up production and bought tanks,” says Kieran Farrell, an owner and director of operations of Gun Hill Brewing, which opened in New York City in 2014. “In hindsight it was a mistake.”

As demand for craft beer ebbs while the costs of doing business increase, breweries are overhauling their business models by offloading production equipment, closing locations, and sharing production equipment, ingredient orders, and even sales and marketing duties with fellow breweries. For VinePair, I take a deep look at how breweries are banding together to better safeguard their futures.