New Belgium Completes East Coast Distribution Center

In advance of its brewing operations, New Belgium Brewing has completed its distribution center in Asheville, North Carolina. The facility is poised to start distributing beers to the East Coast by the end of 2015. Progress continues on the company's new brewery on the French Broad River, which is expected to come on line in the spring of 2016. Here is the release on the distribution center:

Asheville, NC, May 12, 2015 – Reaching another key milestone in bringing their east coast brewery online, New Belgium Brewing’s Asheville Distribution Center construction is complete. The company will begin shipping beer from the Asheville Distribution Center by the end of 2015. The distribution center will serve the eastern United States and will support the company’s national expansion.

“The right partners and the right place; we’re thrilled to be here in Enka-Candler,” said Mark Fischer, New Belgium Senior Plant Engineer. “Our plan is to ship product by the end of 2015 and until then, we’ll be preparing the space for use, refining shipping and receiving practices, and storing raw materials to support the brewery start up later this year.”

Built in partnership with ARCO National Construction – Beverage Group and Finkle Williams Architecture, the 141,000 SF warehouse includes 88,000 SF of refrigerated space, enough to hold 12,000,000 bottles and cans, 50,000 full kegs of beer and 9,000 SF of outside covered storage area, enough to hold 45,000 empty kegs. There’s 44,000 SF of storage for 300 tons of cardboard and raw materials. Forty of New Belgium’s 140 projected Asheville coworkers will be working at the distribution center.

“Our team is quickly expanding and now includes our distribution center manager,” said Philip Pollick, Asheville Packaging Manager. “Come late summer, we’ll be bringing on more coworkers, making this all come alive.”

The New Belgium distribution center is primarily a cold storage warehouse facility, with warehousing and office space. While refrigerated warehouses are not typically known for their environmental sustainability, keeping in step with the company’s commitment to sustainability, New Belgium is pursuing LEED certification. The building is designed to use 25% less energy than a traditional building and the LED lighting uses 20% less energy than conventional lighting system. In the building process, 84% percent of materials were manufactured within 500 miles, while 82% of onsite construction waste was diverted from landfills.

The distribution center comes online prior to the more complex brewery, packaging hall and tasting room being built along the French Broad River, just east of the distribution center, where they will eventually brew 500,000 barrels annually. Hiring began in early 2015 and continues at www.newbelgium.com.