Allagash Brewing Company is continuing its focus on packaged products in 2022, led by its core brands, the Portland, Maine-headquartered craft brewery’s leadership team said during a press briefing Thursday.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Allagash had begun planning an expansion of its off-premise presence, with 64% of its 2019 sales coming from draft, and 36% from package. A couple months before the country first shutdown in March 2020, the brewery finished the installation of a new high speed canning line, allowing for a swift transition to package, as its key on-premise accounts in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Boston came to a halt.
Now, the brewery’s sales are 55% package and 45% draft, and the company increased its total sales volume in 2021 by +32% compared to 2020, and +11% versus 2019, once again crossing the 100,000-barrel threshold this year.
“We are years ahead of where we expected to be,” Allagash founder Rob Tod said. “It’s been fun work, but it has been a ton of work.
“We do not feel like that package business has been at the expense of draft,” he added. “We’re confident we’ll have a good comeback on the draft side.
Allagash credits a great deal of the brewery’s growth to the success of its flagship Allagash White witbier. While the rate of sale for the beer is still below 2019 levels, the brewery increased its draft accounts for Allagash White +2% compared to 2019. Additionally, the company increased off-premise accounts for the brand +35%, and increased “off-premise effective placements” +75% versus 2019.
In 2021, Allagash released multiple pack size options for its core brand, including a 12 oz. 12-pack, which director of sales Naomi Neville credits with driving the witbier’s sales in the off-premise channel. Dollar sales for the brand increased +65% year-to-date through October 24 in total U.S. scan data, and the 12-pack has become the No. 6 craft SKU in grocery in New England, according to Neville.
Looking ahead to 2022, Allagash plans to continue its growth through Allagash White, as well as its two other core brands: River Trip and North Sky — a 7.5% ABV Belgian-inspired stout released in September 2020.
“We’ll continue to focus on the off-premise and on package sales, especially in key accounts, and we’ll continue to build the shelves starting with Allagash White,” Neville said. “We’ll continue to innovate, but we’re also putting the majority of our focus and our marketing dollars behind these three brands next year.”
River Trip will also be getting a makeover in 2022. Rolling out by March of next year, River Trip’s new packaging will display images reflective of the beer’s inspiration story: a canoe trip down the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. Allagash is also changing the beer descriptor on River Trip cans from a Belgian-style sessionable ale to a pale ale.
“We feel like [pale ale] is a really accurate description for the beer and it’s gonna let more people discover it,” Jeff Pillet-Shore, Allagash marketing director, said. “It’s just a more familiar style; [it] doesn’t change the beer one bit.”
While the packaging for River Trip will say “pale ale” on the front, brewmaster Jason Perkins said the brewery will further describe the beer’s unchanged Belgian-inspired ale qualities in its label description.
“We’ve just moved over the years in a direction of communicating as clearly as we can to the consumer who wants just a simple explanation,” Perkins said.
While Allagash will be limiting the amount of new SKUs it releases in 2022, the company still has plans to launch a few specialty brews.
Throughout the year, it will release three speciality 16 oz. 4-packs: Swiftly IPA in the spring, Floating Holiday blonde ale in the summer, and Haunted House hoppy dark ale in the fall.
“We think that these beers offer consumers something that meets the season and both the beer styles and the branding are easily understood by retailers and consumers alike,” Neville said.
The two new beers — Swiftly and Floating Holiday — will be the newest releases out of Allagash’s internal pilot program. Haunted House has been seasonably brought back multiple times by the brewery, after it first launched in 2015.
Allagash will also release Seconds to Summer, a 4.5% ABV lager, as 12 oz. 12-pack in the summer of 2022. Seconds to Summer features Belgian malt and yeast strains, and will be available from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The SKU will join Allagash’s existing single brand 12-packs — Allagash White and River Trip — which Neville said have driven a great deal of off-premise growth. The River Trip SKU launched in July 2021.
Additionally, Allagash will add a new beer to its line of 16 oz. bottle 4-packs, which include Tripel, Curieux, and Barrel & Bean, a variation of barrel-aged Tripel blended with cold-brewed coffee. The newest addition, Day’s End, is a bourbon barrel-aged ale inspired by a boulevardier cocktail, brewed with lambrusco must, angelica root and bitter orange.
In October, Allagash released its first variety pack, a 12 oz. 12-pack featuring Allagash White, River Trip, and Fine Acre organic golden ale, as well as a pack-exclusive release, Great Woods dark wheat ale. The brewery pre-sold and shipped out the variety pack to its retailers within three days of production, Neville said. The completion of the launch has Allagash considering future variety packs, but the company is still working out how it will fit best into the brewery’s portfolio and production schedule.
“It went better than we expected it to go,” Neville said. “But we got a lot of internal talking to do to see if we can do this as a viable addition to our lineup.”
Allagash is also looking into cost increases for its brands in the new year, but has not determined a number at this time.
“[Supply chain constraints are] coming from all angles,” Tod said. “We’re just trying to get our arms around it and figure out the best way forward for next year.”
Along with the brewery’s growth in 2021, Tod said it has had success with its other endeavours. In addition to donating more than $500,000 to local organizations in Maine this year from a combination of consumer donations and a collection of 1% of its revenue, Allagash will also meet its 2021 goal of buying 1 million pounds of grown, processed and packed grain from within its home state.
“It was challenged by a tough harvest but we’re gonna pull it off,” Tod said. “And this is something we’re not going to walk away from in 2022. We’re already discussing internally how we how we continue to run this program.”
Tod also shouted out the passage in July of the Extended Producer Responsibility law for packaging, which Allagash campaigned heavily for. The law “charges any supplier who’s selling goods in the state of Maine for the packaging that ships into the state,” Tod said.
“Given that we’re a B-Corp, given that it’s important to us to do right by our community and our environment here in the state of Maine, this is something that we actually supported,” he continued.
The law allows producers to offset some of the charges by running their own recycling programs. Launched “completely independently of this EPR proposal,” Allagash launched a recycling co-op program of its own in Maine, allowing breweries to drop off recyclable materials such as grain bags and Packtech tops that Tod said Allagash gives to a “responsible recycling source.”
Allagash’s B-Corp status, and its focus on “employees, the environment [and] the community” is also why Tod said the company is not considering a sale or ownership change, a la the proposed sale of Bell’s Brewery to New Belgium parent company Lion Little World Beverages earlier this week.
“We’re certainly not exploring options like that,” Tod said. “I think we still have a tremendous amount of potential, staying independent from a business perspective.
“We’re one of the few truly independent, family-owned breweries in that top 50 list, but it does bring huge benefits from the perspective of our being able to continue to focus 100% on the things that are important to us,” he continued.
Tod noted that Allagash still has a lot of room for distribution expansion, which he said can be best accomplished independently. This year, Allagash added Florida to its network, now consisting of 19 states, plus Washington, D.C.
“If you look at our draft package mix, [it’s] very underdeveloped on the package side,” Tod said. “We just see a huge amount of additional potential to build that side of the business. So with all that potential and running room ahead of us, we don’t feel a whole lot of pressure to team up with anyone to realize that potential and take advantage of that potential.”