Urban Artifact was told that their goofy idea of starting a wild and tart only brewery in Cincinnati Ohio wouldn’t work.  Palates here weren’t developed enough, the niche wasn’t big enough, and I mean – how good can you actually be to compete with the breweries around the world that have been doing this sort of thing for years?

They didn’t listen, and now it’s the naysayers who are first in line to snag up bottles and cans of some of the best fruited sours that you’ll ever pour into your negative Nancy of a face.  I think it’s safe to say that Urban Artifact is on to something!

The Problem With Being So Delicious

The beer at Urban Artifact is amazing, once we understand that and couple it up with the fact that there are few (if any) breweries around that are doing something like this we start to understand the problem with that.  It took a little bit of time for Urban to get their cans into the market, and when they did, they signed with a distributor that allowed them to spread that beer out to some of their goal markets – Ohio, very widely – Indiana, Northern Kentucky, Tennessee.  It has to be a dream come true for a brewer to be able to see someone in Knoxville Tennessee picking up one of your beers off of a shelf and falling in love.  But with this wider distribution comes an issue.

It’s not just hard to keep up with this, it can be impossible if your friends back home in Cincinnati start drinking too much.  The brewery has had limited fermentation capacity since they opened their doors.  If you’ve ever looked around at Urban Artifact you can clearly see that they are dedicated to doing a lot of things, not just quickly growing and expanding their brewing capacity. I suppose in some ways you can say that it caught up with them.  They’ve been slowly shrinking back their distribution footprint to keep up with the demand for their beer here at home.

This is an “easy” problem to solve, though.  And today’s the day… let’s solve some problems!

Solving The Problem

How do you make more beer, so you can move back into the markets that you’ve pulled back from, as well as setting the stage for growth down the line?  You double the capacity of your brewery, that’s how!

Urban Artifact will be receiving new fermenters today that will grow their brewery to a size that means that they can start sending more beer back into NKY – they can get back into Indiana who hasn’t been getting anything, back to parts of Tennessee, and it lays the groundwork for future growth into areas that have yet to get their first sip of Wild Culture.

Every move like this by one of our local breweries is one more step into raising awareness around the country for the exciting things that are happening here in Cincy, and I wish these guys the best of luck as they continue to grow, today and well beyond.  They are some of the nicest, weirdest (in a good way), smartest, and most talented group of people I’ve had the honor of meeting, and I am on the edge of my seat waiting to see what they’ve got up their sleeves for us in the future!

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