Brooklyn Brewery isn’t expecting 2021 to look very different than last year, so the company is budgeting for a repeat of 2020, CEO Eric Ottaway recently told Brewbound.
“Hopefully we get pleasantly surprised,” he said.
Brooklyn finished 2020 down 35% compared to 2019, when the company produced 282,000 barrels of beer, according to volume data from the Brewers Association.
New York City historically has accounted for about half of Brooklyn’s U.S. business. The city “emptied out” during the pandemic and the shift to working at home cut down on commuter traffic, not to mention the more than 60 million tourists who visit the city each year that the pandemic kept away, Ottaway explained. He noted that 60% of Brooklyn’s business in New York City was draft beer and 90% of that business went away during the pandemic-forced shutdowns of bars and restaurants.
“Unless you’re here and walking around, it’s really hard to describe how empty New York City is,” he said.
And Ottaway isn’t banking on that to bounce back to what it looked like pre-pandemic. His expectation is that it’ll be three to four years before it fully turns around.
“That being said, I think it’ll be an initial rapid jump,” he said. “We’ve lost sort of 50% of the city, I think we’ll get, like, the first 30% of that back pretty quickly and then that last 20% is going to take three to four years to come back.”
Nevertheless, Ottaway is optimistic that, as the warmer weather sets in and more people get vaccinated, the city will open up more, capacity constraints will loosen and outdoor dining will resume. In fact, he’s hopeful that the outdoor, sidewalk cafe culture that emerged last summer in the city will continue and spread.
For 2021, Brooklyn will lean on a slate of new offerings including Pulp Art Hazy IPA, the expanded Special Effects non-alcoholic line, which added an IPA at the end of last year, and a line of hard seltzers in addition to its flagship Brooklyn Lager and Summer Ale seasonal.
Pulp Art Hazy IPA (6.5% ABV), which the company officially announced today, will be available year-round throughout Brooklyn’s more than 30 state distribution footprint; international markets will be added later this year. This marks Brooklyn’s first major release in the hazy IPA market, which accounted for 6.5% of craft beer dollar sales in 2020, up 81% from 2019, according to market research firm NielsenIQ.
Pulp Art, which features Citra, Strata and Simcoe hops, will be sold in 6- and 12-packs of 12 oz. cans, 4-packs of 16 oz. cans and on draft; 19.2 oz. single-serve cans will follow in April. It will also be featured in a new “IPA For All” variety 12-pack, with The Stonewall Inn IPA (4% ABV), Brooklyn East IPA (6.9% ABV) and Parktime IPA (5.7% ABV), a new offering that will be exclusive to the pack.
“Pulp Art IPA launches on the palate with crisp bitterness up front, but then quickly opens up onto a range of tropical and stone fruit flavors — mango, tangerine, and peaches. A generous helping of oats gives the beer a round, luscious texture and a gentle sweetness in the center,” brewmaster Garrett Oliver said in a press release. “It signs off with a clean mineral snap and delivers all the flavors we’re looking for in hazy IPAs, but with a really pleasant balance. It’s wonderfully fruity without being a sugar-bomb, so it’s a beer you’ll want to stick with for a few nice pints.”
In addition to Pulp Art, Brooklyn will enter the $4.1 billion hard seltzer market this year. Brooklyn will launch the hard seltzer line this spring, which MyBeerBuzz shared the labels for earlier this month. Flavors for the 100-calorie, 5% ABV hard seltzer line include Black Cherry Apricot, Lemon Cloudberry, and Grapefruit & Mango.
As for Special Effects, Ottaway said Brooklyn has been “pleasantly surprised” with how well the line of non-alcoholic beers has performed thus far in the underdeveloped U.S. market. Special Effects Amber was the company’s fifth best-selling product, accounting for about 5% of its sales, he added.
“In January, the combined Hoppy Amber and IPA together were something like 22% of our sales,” Ottaway said. “So it’s making up quite a meaningful portion of our U.S. portfolio, and we think that’ll continue.”
Ottaway noted that January’s numbers weren’t a “Dry January” bump, but more continued month-over-month growth for the Special Effects line.
“Our January sales didn’t look a whole lot different than our December sales,” he said. “Although we did add Special Effects IPA on top of it; that was all incremental growth on top of the 90% growth of the Amber had over the previous year.”
Of course, the loss of draft sales has skewed some of the numbers as consumers have shifted their purchases to off-premise retailers.
“That really distorts a lot of the comparisons when you’re looking at brand versus brand at the moment,” Ottaway said. ”Do I think that the Special Effects portfolio will continue at 22% to 25% of our portfolio? It’s possible, but of course, as draft comes back, it’ll boost other brands, much more rapidly. So, we shall see, but I would not be surprised in the long-term if the Special Effects brand family doesn’t end up being a good quarter of our sales.”
In order to make room for these new products, Brooklyn has discontinued its Pilsner, Brown Ale, and Defender IPA, Ottaway said.
“We’ve done some pretty proactive and hard pruning this year,” he said. “But I guess as the gardening analogy goes, you prune hard and you get better growth.”