The success of Uinta Brewing’s IPA is anything but another notch on the belt.
After making its debut in September of 2011, the Utah-based brewery’s Hop Notch IPA has grown to become the company’s largest single brand. Uinta president Will Hamill said the aromatic beer will represent about 35 percent of total sales before the end of the year.
“Hop Notch is continuing to grow but we have yet to get a handle on projections because we can’t make enough,” he said. “It has done well very on draft and in bottles. We also released cans in March and have seen incremental sales above and beyond our bottle volume.”
Hamill chalks up the success of Hop Notch and other brands like WYLD and BABA to a redesigned company logo, a proprietary “compass bottle” and the introduction of packaging in cans.
“We are adding another dimension to where we can sell our beer and I think we have hit a market that we weren’t able to hit before,” he said of cans, which are expected to comprise about 15 percent of total production in 2013.
Hamill projects Unita’s 2013 production to total 66,000 barrels, up from 45,000 barrels in 2012, and is hopeful that a $15 million expansion project will be completed in December. The addition of a 130-barrel brewhouse and six 700-barrel fermentation tanks will allow Uinta to increase capacity to 325,000 barrels, 135,000 of which will go online immediately.
In this video interview, filmed at the recently held 2013 Craft Brewer’s Conference, Hamill discusses the overall growth of craft, the addition of cans to Unita’s portfolio and the brewery’s five year plan.