Get Ready For New Belgium In Louisiana!

Hey everyone, exciting new beer news today from BeerPulse.com as it was announced that New Belgium Brewing (facebook - twitter) out of Fort Collins, Colorado is looking to make their way to the Louisiana market in April of 2013.  They will of course bring with them their popular Fat Tire Amber Ale, but more exciting to me is their Lips Of Faith series.  This is their select series including collaborations with other breweries and often showcasing some of the sour or wild styles.  This is pretty exciting for beer drinkers in and around Baton Rouge, and it's always great to get a new brewery in town.    

Full press release:

(Fort Collins, CO) – New Belgium is headed to Louisiana and Alaska in 2013 and has a lot of new beers coming in the pipeline for next year, according to the company’s spokesman. BeerPulse caught up with Bryan Simpson last week to get the skinny on future plans.

"Both of those states are ones that we’ve been looking at for a long time,” says Simpson. “Certainly Louisana being contiguous to Texas makes a lot of sense where we have trucks already heading down there. We think Alaska is an interesting place. A lot of us just have an affinity for it and we have a couple folks who have lived up there.”

The company is in the midst of building distributor profiles and timing is expected to be by early fall, similar to when the company entered Michigan. Correction: New Belgium says on Twitter that Louisiana will be “mid-April-ish.”

Simpson explains that the company is in a holding pattern of sorts when it comes to capacity so in order to add more-densely populated areas, they’d have to add more capacity than what they’re currently in the midst of adding.

New Belgium is on pace to brew 775,000 barrels this year, up nearly 9% from last year’s mark of 713,000 barrels. With the addition of new tanks, annual capacity grows from 800,000 barrels to 925,000 barrels.

As for the beer lineup…
Shift Pale Lager is coming to 12 oz. cans and draft with a national rollout slated for February.
Belgo IPA will be replaced by Rampant Imperial IPA at the end of the first quarter and will be a first Imperial IPA for them in the core lineup.
Rolle Bolle Belgian Golden Ale will replace Somersault as the summer seasonal and Accumulation White IPA will replace Snow Day as the winter seasonal.
Red Hoptober and Dig will return again as seasonals.

New to the Lips of Faith Series in Q1 will be Sultana Cascara Quad. Cascara is the husk of a coffee bean and adds an earthy and leathery tone to the beer. Other Lips of Faith beers to come include: Pluot (Q2), Coconut Curry Hefeweizen and a new wild ale (Q3), Yuzu Berlinerweiss (Q4).

New Belgium also has some collaborations in the works, each to be released as part of the Lips of Faith Series.

They will brew with Dieu de Ciel on a Q1 beer called Feijoa. Another will be a dandelion beer with Red Rock out of Utah called Paardebloem. That will come out in Q2. There is currently no collaboration partner lined up for the fall. The brewers will team up with De Dolle on a release next winter.