In an effort to double its production capacity, Athletic Brewing Company has acquired a third brewing site to cope with its enormous growth, which has been 62% year-over-year in the past 12 months. The seller is Kings & Convicts Brewing, which sold San Diego’s largest beer manufacturing facility, the former Ballast Point Brewing site in San Diego’s Miramar community.
Athletic Brewing is the number one non-alcoholic beer brand in the U.S., with over 19% market share, and is the 20th largest brewing company in the country by volume. The beers are currently available at over 50,000 retailers and 25,000 on-premise venues nationwide.
The deal closed on May 31 but was not revealed until today, although word had been spreading throughout the local brewing industry for more than a month. Athletic Brewing has now shared that it purchased the 107,000-square-foot facility, which includes the site’s 300-barrel and 150-barrel brewhouses, cellar, packaging line, QA lab, and business offices. The bar and restaurant will continue to be operated by Kings & Convicts as a Ballast Point-branded public venue for at least the next 18 months.
According to the company’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer John Walker, the brewery will undergo major renovations and enhancements, making it non-operational for the next year and a half. Therefore, no Kings & Convicts employees were included in the transaction, and Ballast Point’s beers will be brewed on a contract basis by an undisclosed brewing partner.
“We plan to utilize the capacity at Carroll Way to its fullest with the addition of a brand-new, state-of-the-art packaging hall capable of filling 1,200 cans per minute, and implementing some amazing brewing technology which will enhance sustainability as we continue to reduce our use of one of our most precious resources – water,” says Walker. “Our team will take the next 18 months to make efficiency and food-safety modifications while we build the packaging hall, and we look forward to the day when we can fire up both the main and the pilot brewhouses.”
The history of Ballast Point is long and multifaceted. Started in the back of Home Brew Mart, a homebrew supply store, Ballast Point Brewing Company was founded in 1996 by Jack White in San Diego, California. As of 2015, it was the 17th largest brewery in the country based on sales volume, with its main production facility in Miramar. The same year the brewery was sold for a record sum of USD 1 billion to Constellation Brands, who sold the brewery just four years later to Kings & Convicts (inside.beer, 4.12.2019)
