![]() The problem of exploding cans has been an ongoing conversation over the last several years, as sweet beers made with real fruit have grown in popularity. They’re keeping a close eye on legislation that will allow them to ship to consumers in new states in the coming years. That new approach is not a huge volume-mover, but the founders believe it has more long-term growth potential than their taproom, concert, and event spaces do. That ratio has dropped off as taprooms have reopened, so Urban Artifact adapted its model again, and has since focused on a subscription club that allows it to find an audience for some of its more esoteric beers. Initially, DTC offered the brewery a one-to-one replacement for its lost taproom sales. When the COVID pandemic began, the brewery began shipping beer through its website almost immediately, in part because it had already planned on bringing that sales avenue online. Ohio and some other states have laws allowing alcohol producers to ship to a customer’s front door, and Urban Artifact is doing that in 10 of the 12 states it currently distributes to. Urban Artifact is also selling to that audience wherever it can through direct-to-consumer (DTC) channels. The Gadget is brewed with blackberries and raspberries, and has become the brewery’s best-seller. By 2018, Urban Artifact had become defined by brands like The Gadget, the flagship beer of its Midwest Fruit Tart line of heavily fruited but shelf-stable Sour Ales. They were already using fruit in a few beers, and saw an avenue to distinguish themselves by focusing on quicker Sours with vibrant fruit expressions. “So all the players kept coming in, but the pie stayed the same size. “We fell into the trap that everybody else fell into, of thinking that with the barrel-aged Sours and funky stuff, the pie was going to keep growing,” says Kollmann Baker. Unfortunately, the public didn’t turn out to be as sustainably interested in that time-consuming branch of brewing as they were. The founders saw no growth potential in being an everything-for-everybody brewery in a city that already had Rhinegeist Brewery and MadTree Brewing, and thought that funky, barrel-aged oddities would set them apart. When Urban Artifact opened in 2015, the plan was for that niche to be general sour and mixed-fermentation beers. From Barons to Barrels with Captain Pabst.Message in a Bottle with Brewery Ommegang.Beer is Labor with East Brother Beer Co.Let Go or Get Dragged by Jerard Fagerberg.Ferments at Low Temps by Stephanie Byce.
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