Shipyard bucks national trend as pumpkin beer brewers cut production

Photo / Lori Valigra Fred Forsley, owner of Shipyard Brewing in Portland, is bucking a national trend by launching pumpkin beer later in the season to take advantage of fall holidays.

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By Lori Valigra

Last year's bumper crop of pumpkins may have thrilled trick-or-treaters, but brewers making seasonal pumpkin-spiced beer ran into an oversaturated market, with distributors and consumers buying less.

A recent Forbes article says brewers across the country have been spooked into cutting production this year, but Shipyard Brewing co-founder and President Fred Forsley says he's bucking the national trend.

Already under pressure from the increasingly crowded craft beer market, which contributes more than $400 million to the state's economy, Forsley has decided to space out pumpkin-spiced beer production, making it later in the year, when it won't compete with summer beers.

“We were bringing in Pumpkinhead in late July when we should have been brewing summer beer,” Forsley tells Mainebiz. “In recent years there's been consumer pushback of having too many pumpkin beers too early. So this year we released it toward the end of August, and hope it will stay strong through November.” He plans to release it three more weeks later next year.

The brewery, which is the largest in Maine with more than a 10% market share, also makes the most pumpkin-spiced beer among Maine's more than 80 brewers. Forsley says Shipyard will produce more than 45,000 barrels of pumpkin-spiced beer this year, primarily the higher selling Pumpkinhead Ale, but also the more expensive and higher alcohol content Smashed Pumpkin. For the past two years he was making 54,000 barrels.

“It's a big risk in strategy to make Halloween and Thanksgiving the primary holidays for the beer,” he says, adding that he has been able to sell 100,000 cases with 24 bottles each of Pumpkinhead in August, but by pushing production till September he's not sure if he'll be able to recapture those August sales in November. One big reason is competitors who produce their beer earlier are marketing heavily during Octoberfest.

With the pumpkin-spiced beer downturn last year, Shipyard lost about 10% of its revenue. This year it hopes to gross more than $40 million and produce about 140,000 to 150,000 barrels of all beers, which is flat growth from last year. Pumpkinhead contributes 35% to 40% of total revenue.

“Shipyard is really the big producer in the state of pumpkin beer. In fact, I think that if even if you only counted their pumpkin beer production, they would still be one of the biggest breweries in the state (if not the biggest),” says Sean Sullivan, executive director of the Maine Brewers' Guild in South Portland.

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