Lee Hereford, PBC president and CEO, left, and Peter McFarlane, brewmaster, said growth has caused a need to look at future water options. — Standard-Radio Post/Ken Esten Cooke
By Matt Ward —
Selling beer has become second nature to Lee Hereford, president and CEO of Pedernales Brewing Company.
The company, now in its fourth year, is busting through production records with statewide sales exploding at an exponential rate.
Now, Hereford has a new product to sell with a sales pitch targeted directly to neighboring businesses along U.S. 87 South — annexation into the City of Fredericksburg.
Need for annexation
Significant growth at the brewing facility — located just outside the city’s extraterritorial jurisdiction along U.S. 87 South — has forced the annexation issue.
“We’ve anticipated the need for city water and sewer services since day one,” PBC brewmaster Peter McFarlane said. “Our first year, we grew over 100 percent. Second year, I think we grew over 50 percent. We came out with a new beer (in 2014) and that’s really jettisoned us pretty much overnight into maximum capacity for this facility.”
PBC’s latest offering — the Robert Earl Keen honey pilsner developed in conjunction with the Texas country musician last year — has pushed the brewery to maximum production capacity.
Two additional 80-barrel brewing tanks are expected to come online later this summer and will result in increase of eight to ten percent total production capacity, or “basically another eight to ten thousand cases a month,” McFarlane said.
Craft beer ‘on fire’
Eight hundred new craft breweries opened nationwide in 2014 with less than 50 going under, helping the nation’s craft beer industry grow to 3,400 breweries.
Since Jan. 1, 15 new breweries have opened for operation in Texas.
“Craft beer is just on fire,” Hereford said. “We know that we’re going to continue to grow.”
PBC distributors reported 52 percent growth over the first quarter of 2015, with an additional 61 percent growth in sales during April alone.
“If we keep growing like we’re growing at, we’ll run out of acreage in a few years,” McFarlane said. “We only have 19 acres here, so there’s a certain amount of land that we can use to apply our wastewater and I want to have annexation here well before we get close to running out of places to spray the effluent water.”
Water needs
Breweries typically use 10 gallons of water to make one gallon of beer, though it varies by brewery size and efficiencies.
Pedernales Brewing operates at about a 7:1 water-to-beer ratio, McFarlane said, with each barrel of beer — 31 gallons of beer per barrel — using about 217 gallons of water.
PBC brewed 5,000 barrels of beer in 2014, which translates to approximately 1.085 million gallons of water used in the brewing process.
“This year, we’re on track to do between 8,000-9,000 barrels,” Hereford said.
Assuming a production level of 8,500 in 2015, 1.844 million gallons of water will be used to brew PBC products this year, an increase of 759,500 gallons.
City officials believe their water system can accommodate Pedernales Brewing’s needs, thanks to the city’s water conservation program, which has given the city the capability to support 600-700 additional residential water customers.
“When you look at Pedernales Brewing at 300,000 (gallons) a month, you can equate that to those single family residential units going in and we could accommodate that right now,” Clinton Bailey, city director of public works and utilities, said. “That’s not very much water. We have residences in Stone Ridge that use 100,000 (gallons per month).”
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