Urban Chestnut Brewing Company (UCBC) has announced plans to significantly expand its brewing operations in the City of St. Louis.
UCBC announced on Monday its plans to build a new brewery in “the Grove” neighborhood located off of Manchester Blvd. The brewery will occupy the former Renard Paper Company building at Manchester and Taylor. UCBC will be partnering with Green Street St. Louis (Green Street), a real estate firm specializing in redevelopment of underutilized commercial properties into LEED certified buildings.
Urban Chestnut was founded in 2010 by two former Anheuser-Busch employees Florian Kuplent and David Wolfe. Their current 20-barrel brew house, taste room and biergarten on Washington Ave. in Midtown will remain open as a test brew operation, as well as to package and sell smaller batch beers.
The new location will feature a 70,000 square-foot production brewery, packaging facility, warehouse and indoor/outdoor retail taste room. When complete it will be the largest microbrew facility in St. Louis, eclipsing Schlafly’s Maplewood Bottleworks in terms of size and brewing capacity.
“People might ask why open a second facility in St. Louis?” said UCBC's David Wolfe. “Well, first and foremost 95 percent of the beer we sold last year was in St. Louis, and like Schlafly and many of the other small, local brewers, we’re dedicated to the evolution of St. Louis as a craft beer destination."
“We’ve been growing at about 200 percent, year over year, and we never imagined we’d grow this fast. Essentially it means we’re going to run out of the space to add further capacity at our current location sometime this year,” Kuplent said in a press release.
The new location in slated to open in early 2014. UCBC’s owners claim the facility will have an annual capacity to brew approximately 15,000 barrels, with the space to expand to 100,000 barrels. Urban Chestnut brewed around 3,500 barrels in 2012 and expects to brew 7,000 in 2013.
Additionally, the UCBC's founders claim the project will create 10 full-time and 30 part-time jobs within the next two years.
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