Afton microbrewery first in Virginia to put beer in cans

In July 2009, Blue Mountain Brewery, of Afton, took a gamble, stepped up to the plate and became Virginia’s first microbrewery to put its beer into 12-ounce aluminum cans.

And that one mighty swing, they hit a home run.

“We sell out of it all the time,” said Taylor Smack, co-owner of the brewery, of the canned beers. “Every two weeks, 1,000 gallons of Full Nelson comes through the pipeline. Of that, we can a small portion and it’s always sold out before we get the next batch out there. We can’t keep up with it.”

The brewery cans only its flagship beer, the Full Nelson.

They have a very simple but laborious process, Smack said, with a hand-operated filler and seamer that narrows the production to one can being sealed at a time.

Smack said one of the reasons the brewery decided to go into canning was that was the direction he saw craft brewing headed.

“Craft beer is always trying to find the next big thing that will help our market segment,” he said. “Cans are extremely environmentally friendly and they’re 20 times lighter than glass. It’s also great for the beer because there’s no light exposure.”

When Smack and his wife, Mandi, and business partner Matt Nucci, began Blue Mountain Brewery in 2007, they never thought it would get so big, so fast.

Currently, it produces more than 2,300 barrels of its 20 styles of beer per year, tapping out their production capacity.

“This is about the max that we’ll be able to do here” with the current infrastructure, Smack said. “The biggest we had in our business plan was in 2016, we expected to do 1,900 barrels per year and we’re way past that.”

The Full Nelson canned beer is available only in fewer than a dozen locations around Virginia, but Blue Mountain Brewery’s other beers can be found in more than 500 stores statewide.

And like the hops on the brewery land, the numbers just keep growing.

When Blue Mountain Brewery opened in October 2007, they had six employees. The company now employs 40 people. They began with one cook and now have eight. Smack was the only brewer in 2007 and they now have four.

And for those keeping track, the brewery’s Facebook fan page has more than 1,900 fans.

“Nelson is becoming a big thing with beer,” Smack said. “People are coming here. It’s just way past what we thought it would ever be and I don’t see it stopping at any point soon.”

They plan to expand the restaurant side of the business in the near future to accommodate more customers. A larger brewing facility is farther in the future.

“We could sell probably 20 to 30 times the amount of beer in this state and we get requests all the time from other states,” Smack said. “My goal is just to saturate Virginia. I’m perfectly happy to just work within my home state. If we creep into other states, so be it, but we’ve got a long way to go.”