Kona Brewing Co. plans to resurrect an old recipe to brew at a new beer production plant slated to break ground Friday on Hawaii island.
The Kailua-Kona-based company said it worked with its first brew master, John “Kit” Kittrege, to reproduce the original recipe for Fire Rock Pale Ale that helped launch Kona Brewing 22 years ago. The new, old beer dubbed First Rock will be a limited release.
Kona Brewing is investing $20 million to build a new brewery on 2.6 acres leased from the Queen Liliuokalani Trust near the company’s existing brewery in Kailua-Kona.
“The groundbreaking marks the start of an exciting new chapter in Kona Brewing’s history, and I am extremely grateful to our colleagues, our customers and our friends and families who make up the Big Island community who have enabled us to get to where we are today,” Cameron Healy, who co-founded the company in 1994 with his son, Spoon Khalsa, said in a statement.
In 2010, Kona Brewing became part of Oregon-based Craft Brew Alliance Inc., a publicly traded firm that owns Redhook and Widmer Brothers breweries in Oregon, Washington state and New Hampshire. The largest shareholder of Craft Brew is Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest beer maker.
The new facility will increase annual production capacity from 12,000 barrels to 100,000 barrels, or from 368,000 gallons to 3 million gallons, and allow Kona Brewing to shift from locally producing only kegged beer to both kegged and canned beer. Currently, all nondraft Kona Brewing beers are made at affiliated breweries on the mainland and shipped to Hawaii.
Kona Brewing also said it will be able to produce more small-batch recipes, and that the new brewery will be more friendly to the environment by featuring a photovoltaic system capable of generating up to half of the facility’s energy needs, plus a program to recycle organic byproducts from making beer to produce electricity, heat and clean water.
The groundbreaking ceremony will include a traditional Hawaiian blessing and is expected to be attended by more than 100 people. Construction is expected to take about two years and finish in 2018.
