UPDATED: Founders Brewing Co. to add second brewery in Grand Rapids

UPDATED: Founders Brewing Co. to add second brewery in Grand Rapids

GRAND RAPIDS — After outgrowing its current production space, Founders Brewing Co. plans to add a second brewery in Grand Rapids.

The additional facility, located at 900 Hynes St. SW, will focus on “barrel-aged, experimental, high-gravity, and specialty beers that we’ve become known for,” the company stated in a release posted on its website.

“The driving reason for the second location is to consolidate warehousing, which had been at three separate locations,” partner and Executive Chairman John Green told MiBiz in an interview. “We asked ourselves, ‘Can we be more efficient in how we brew some of our specialty and bourbon-barrel beers?’”

The ability to store all those beers in the same location “presents a lot of efficiencies,” Green said.

The Hynes Ave. location gives the brewery an additional 115,000 square feet of space with additional room to expand in the future. Founders expects to produce between 200,000 and 250,000 barrels of beer at the site.

Green said the company is still finalizing the numbers, but he expects the capital investment to be between $15 million and $20 million.

Founders does not plan to build a taproom at the site. Operations at the site will start on Jan. 29 and production is anticipated to start in the summer.

In recent years, Founders Brewing expanded to encompass an entire city block at its facility at 235 Grandville Ave., where it will have a production capacity of 900,000 barrels of beer when the second phase of construction gets wrapped up. Work on the second phase will begin this spring and could be brought online by July, executives said during a presentation last week in the Michigan Brewers Guild.

Since moving from North Monroe Avenue to Grandville Avenue in 2007, Founders has been in a near-constant state of expansion, for both its taproom and its production facilities.

This latest expansion, Green said, should serve Founders for years to come.

When asked whether the next expansion would be an out-of-state facility, Green said, “We would never rule it out, but we don’t currently have any plans to expand beyond our taproom.”


Editor’s note: This story has been changed from its original form to include comments from Founders Executive Chairman John Green.