Nine Locks moves next door, and to another level
It’s not many business owners that look fondly on government red tape, but slow-moving bureaucracy worked out just fine for Nine Locks Brewing. The largest craft brewer in the province opens a new facility on Waverley Road in Dartmouth on Thursday, so close to the old one that workers are literally walking back and forth with boxes.
The new site took four years of planning and 14 months of construction.
“We’ve been over capacity next door for four years now, it comes off the line and gets on a truck and goes to the liquor stores,” Danny O’hearn, co-founder, said. “We were going to build on Prince Albert Road, that was during COVID and the city took such a long time to get us a permit that we outgrew the space. So, they did us a favour.”
At another level of government, O’hearn said battling with the province to get permission to increase production levels is one of their biggest challenges.
“Don’t penalize us for being successful,” he said.
O’hearn and his partners bought a separate building out back just to store cans since the new 30,000-squarefoot structure will have so much more capacity. Their current line can fill 24 cans per minute, the new one will do 200.
“A lot more brands, a lot more volume,” he said. “Right now, we’re looking at the possibility of a pasteurizer, which would open up more doors for us, and there are products we can’t do next door that we could do here. So, it grows our business and we want to be able to ship our beer everywhere as well.”
Nine Locks beers are sold in all four Atlantic provinces, plus Manitoba and Alberta, and the market for its products could soon get much bigger.
“We’ve applied for a listing in Ontario and have been accepted to round two. They’ve asked for samples and we’re told that’s a very good indication we could get a listing. That could be big,” O’hearn said. “Last year we hit close to 16-thousand hectolitres, or a little bit over. We have projections to grow at a certain pace and we could do up to 50-thousand hectolitres here. That’s capacity.
“We still make everything in small batches. Our 30-barrel system that we brew in is not a big system, and to fill our tanks we just have to brew more of them.”
Nine Locks executives have been in their new offices for a few weeks, and it’s the retail shop that is to open imminently. Production will continue to take place in the old building for a few more months.
Asked what he likes best about the new digs, O’hearn had to ponder it.
“Probably our retail store, what it’s going to look like,” he settled on. “We have a tap room, which we’ve never had before, so people can come in and sample our products. We were never allowed to do that next door.”
Nine Locks opened with three SKUS, and in part because O’hearn’s list of contacts developed over 30 years in beer sales, which “made it easy” to get listings in bars and restaurants, it now has more than a dozen SKUS.
The new building cost “a lot more” than 15 million dollars, and the company expects employment to increase slightly.
“We may gain some in some areas, and lose some in other areas so the jobs may shift. Right now, with our locations in Halifax and Dartmouth we’re at 45 employees,” O’hearn said. “I would say the industry is not as healthy as it was a few years ago, there’s a few craft breweries in trouble and looking for investors and need some help. It’s life, something gets hot, everybody jumps in and then they weed themselves out.”