Lagunitas is planning another brewery, this time in Southern California.
Brewery founder Tony Magee took to Twitter late last night to make the big reveal, detailing plans for the company’s third brewing facility, which will be located in Azusa, Calif., just 25 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.
The new 178,000 sq. ft. facility will initial brewing capacity of 420,000 barrels, according to Magee. Slated to open in early 2017, Lagunitas #3, as Magee called it, will have 38 ft. high ceilings and will eventually be capable of producing 1 million barrels.
“It’s spittin distance [from] the Irwindale Miller Brewery,” he tweeted.
And, much like when Lagunitas embarked on plans to build a second facility in Chicago, which opened exactly one year ago, the company doesn’t plan to accept any city or state incentives for building in Azusa.
“No State grants, no City money asked. A nice new building already under construction,” he tweeted.
So why is the company building in Los Angeles, especially at a time when California breweries are already wrestling with the challenges of a severe drought?
Lagunitas, which was founded in Petaluma, Calif. in 1994, is butting up against capacity constraints at its Northern California brewery. That location will max out at 750,000 barrels this year and, according to company spokesperson Ron Lindenbusch, Lagunitas doesn’t want to ship beer west from Chicago to sustain its growing business in California.
Lagunitas, currently ranked as the sixth largest craft producer in the U.S., made 601,420 barrels of beer in 2014, up from 401,420 barrels the year prior. The latest IRI figures peg off-premise (MULC) sales up more than 56 percent through May 17.
Specific financial details about the Azusa project were not available as of press time, but, for comparison, Lagunitas Chicago was initially slated to cost $26 million. That facility, located inside a 300,000 sq. ft. warehouse, was capable of producing 300,000 barrels annually and featured a 250-barrel brewhouse went it opened last June.