Steam Whistle CEO says craft brewery is sticking with bottles as others shift away

Greg Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Steam Whistle, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss the outlook for Canadian breweries amid trade war.

The head of Steam Whistle Brewing says the craft brewery will continue to sell its beer in bottles, despite shifting preferences that have made cans the more popular choice for consumers and retailers alike.

“I just love it out of the bottle; it looks better, it feels better, it’s more of a premium experience for sure,” Greg Taylor, Steam Whistle’s co-founder and CEO, told BNN Bloomberg in an interview on Wednesday.

Taylor’s comments came after Moosehead, Canada’s oldest independent brewery, caused a stir amongst beer drinkers last week when it announced it will do away with its iconic green bottle and switch solely to cans and kegs for its entire product line.

“We love Moosehead, but Steam Whistle started out with a green bottle, it was from the 1940s when the bottle that we have today was actually the industry standard bottle; everyone used it,” Taylor said.

“It has a crimp crown on it, so it doesn’t have a twist off, you have to open it with an opener, but once you get it open and put it to your lip, it’s just the kiss of the golden nectar.”

Although bottles remain popular amongst a certain demographic of beer drinkers, most consumers today purchase cans, including the majority of Steam Whistle’s customers, Taylor acknowledged.

“Seventy per cent of our business is in cans today,” he said. “It’s certainly a popular pack, not only for consumers but for retailers, but we’re sticking with the bottles because it just tells the whole story of Steam Whistle.”

For Saint John, N.B.-based Moosehead, its decision to scrap bottling for canning would have been unthinkable 30 years ago, when 90 per cent of the beer it sold was in bottles, the brewery’s president and CEO Andrew Oland told CTV News last week.

“When my great-great-great-grandmother Susanna Oland started brewing beer in 1867, we only sold it in kegs, and we didn’t start selling in bottles until 1933. Then cans came in the mid-1950s,” he said.

“We’re very proud of our past but we’re always focused on our future and focused on what we need to do next to keep earning the trust and the support of beer drinkers.”

Taylor said cans are more convenient than bottles when it comes to shipping and storage, and they also cost less to make. “But the bottle for us is still very popular and we’re continuing with it,” he said, noting that Steam Whistle’s “suitcase” 12 pack remains a customer favourite.

Steam Whistle is Canada’s largest independent craft brewery, said Taylor, and it operates solely in the Canadian market, selling just one beer, which is calls “Canada’s premium pilsner.”

The Toronto-based brewery has no current plans to grow its product line or expand into other markets such as the U.S. or Europe, he said.

“We love Canada, that’s where the opportunity is for us, we’ll leave the U.S. to themselves, especially these days,” Taylor said, “and Europe’s tough for us because we’re all natural, so you’d need months and months of shelf life just to ship over there.”

In Ontario, the Canadian province home to the most breweries, beer producers are facing another shifting trend, as consumers are now able to purchase alcohol from grocery and convenience stores.

This has led to a number of The Beer Store closures in the province, which is where most consumers go to return their empties.

“Beer retailing has become ubiquitous in Ontario for sure, the problem is returning your empty cans and bottles. That is affecting us to some degree because there used to be hundreds of beer stores across the province where you could return your bottles,” said Taylor.

“Not so these days, a lot of them have closed, and grocery stores are yet to start providing that service. We’ll see what happens, but we still get about 75 per cent of our bottles returned to The Beer Store so it’s very efficient and it’s great for the environment because the bottles are recycled.”

With files from CTV News Atlantic