(Stamford, CT) – A lot of the buzz over the past year around Western Connecticut may be about a brewery that has yet to open. Much smaller in scale but not to be overlooked, Half Full Brewery opened just a few weeks ago. BeerPulse pinged the company with a few questions in August. Here’s a quick profile of this startup brewery.

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1) What is annual working capacity at the current facility?

We have a 20-barrel DME brewing system with four 40-barrel fermenters and one 40-barrel brite tank. On this current system, we can produce about 3,000 barrels annually.

2) What are your plans to expand that capacity if at all? Any idea on “maximum expandable capacity?”

We have a decent amount of space and over our 5 years here, we hope to add eight 60-barrel fermenters and two 60-barrel brite tanks, which would enable us to brew up to 12,000 barrels.

3) What are your future plans from a building standpoint?

The hope is to expand into a location with larger ceilings that will accommodate fermenters that are larger than 60 barrels at the end of our lease. At that point, we’d hopefully have enough space to add a bottling line as well.

4) Who manufactured the brewing system?

Diversified Metal Engineering out of Prince Edward Islands, Canada.

5) What markets are your beers in now (and when/where will you expand them)?

We are really focusing on our local market, i.e. Stamford and shortly Fairfield County, which is one of the most populated counties in the US and didn’t have a packaging microbrewery before us. This has been a big import, wine and spirits market and we are looking to really expand the better beer education of the locals here to make it a bigger beer market.

We hope to eventually expand into our neighboring counties (New Haven and Litchfield counties in CT, Westchester and New York County in New York) and really concentrate ourselves in this tight area that fits within basically a 75-mile radius of our brewery.

We are going to be a really fun and unique brewery that focuses on refreshing beer, refreshing people, and refreshing experiences and rather than water down what we care about most (living “Half Full”) by expanding all over the place, we want to concentrate ourselves in an area where people can easily visit us, easily get their hands on the beer, and thus easily experience what we are all about.

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