Denver’s Great Divide Brewing Company rolled out a brand refresh last week that gives the 28-year-old craft brewery’s 12 oz. 6-packs a more unified look on store shelves, founder Brian Dunn told Brewbound.
Great Divide partnered with Grit, a local marketing agency that the company has worked with since 2018, on the packaging refresh.
“We needed to corral everything and make it work in one system, so it stands out as a block a little bit better,” Dunn said.
The can packaging also bears the phrase, “Independent Then, Independent Now.”
The brand refresh follows a year in which Great Divide’s production increased +20%, to an estimated 25,000 barrels, according to the May/June issue of the Brewers Association’s New Brewer magazine. The production growth last year followed several years of declines following the company’s peak output year of 2015 when the brewery produced 43,806 barrels of beer.
“There’s still plenty of runway for us, especially in Colorado,” VP of sales and marketing Kirk Simpson said.
The change reflects the evolution of the Great Divide brand, as the company has refocused on its core markets in recent years. As part of that strategy, Great Divide moved all production back under one roof at its original Arapahoe Street brewery at the end of 2021 after selling its 2.2 acre River North (RiNo) facility.
The Arapahoe brewery — located just a few blocks away from Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies Major League Baseball club — has capacity to produce about 55,000 barrels, depending on the mix, Dunn said.
“The two facilities worked as well as they could have,” Dunn said. “But we were moving beer from the brewery to the packaging hall, and now we don’t have to do that anymore. This really made things more flexible for us.”
The Arapahoe Street brewery now features a new KHS can line capable of running 210 cans a minute, a key addition for Great Divide, which shifted away from bottles and fully into cans over the last 12 months. The transition has worked, as “that volume just transferred over to cans,” Dunn said.
“It’s much, much easier for us — easier to keep beer fresh,” he added. “It was just getting to the point where we had too many SKUs of styles in multiple packages.”
The new canning line has also enabled Great Divide to brew in smaller batches.
“We were having to move a minimum of 200 barrels at a time over to the other building, and now we can off smaller runs than that,” Dunn said. “So it’s added a lot of flexibility for us.”
Meanwhile, Great Divide’s Barrel Bar taproom and Barrel Cellar private events space in the River North neighborhood are still operating, and the company expects to maintain those spaces “for the foreseeable future.” Dunn said the company is occupying “about 40% of that building,” which in addition to the taproom and events space also houses Great Divide’s logistics operations, warehousing, barrel storage, refrigerated space, and dry warehousing.
Dunn added that the company repackages its mixed 12-packs at the facility. Variety 12-packs — Hoppy variety pack and Candemonium — are “performing very well,” Simpson said. The company is also becoming “more disciplined” with Candemonium’s 90 to 100-day rotations.
“Those two brands have really seen a spike,” Simpson said.
Beyond variety packs, Great Divide is focused on its IPAs: Titan IPA, which is up +10% this year, and Hazy IPA, which is up +35%, Dunn said. Also back for 2022 is Wild Raspberry Ale after a 10-year hiatus, Simpson added.
In order to focus its portfolio more, Great Divide is phasing out 6-packs of Claymore Scotch ale and Hercules double IPA. However, Dunn and Simpson teased that Hercules is likely to return as a 19.2 oz. single-serve aimed at the convenience channel.
“We’ll see if there is room for it on convenience store shelves in the future,” Simpson said.
Following February’s Yeti Awareness marketing campaign, Great Divide is in the midst of its May to July Peanut Butter Yeti imperial stout release, which will be followed by Pumpkin Spice Yeti (August-October) and the newly released Gingerbread Yeti (November-December).
Although sales of Great Divide’s hard seltzer brand, Whitewater, are “a little bit softer” this year, the brand will continue on, Dunn said.
“We still think there’s a place for our two seltzer 12-packs in our mix,” he said.
Dunn said his biggest concern moving forward is the cost of supplies, such as ingredients and packing materials. He added that he doesn’t see “much relief in the near term.”
“It’s really expensive to brew beer, and that’s probably one of my more concerning things as I look forward,” Dunn said.
One of the biggest expenses currently is fruit, as “grapefruit and raspberries have gone through the roof,” Dunn said, which hurts margins as grapefruit is a key ingredient in Roadie Radler.
“All of our fruit ingredients — some of them — have more than doubled,” Dunn said. “Cans have been a pain.”
According to Simpson, Great Divide has made strategic package and draft price increases to help offset some of those increased costs.
Looking ahead, Dunn said he sees opportunities for growth by opening additional retail locations in Colorado to help grow brand awareness. Great Divide operates satellite locations at Denver International Airport and the Castle Rock Brewery and Roadhouse.
“Both of those locations are basically up over the best times that we ever saw them,” Dunn said.
“We’re as excited about the future as we ever have been,” Simpson added.