Northside craft brewery Urban Artifact will begin offering its beers in cans for the first time beginning next month.
The brewery will initially offer its Finn Berliner Pale Ale and Sliderule Chocolate Raspberry Gose in cans.
Urban Artifact is canning its popular Finn Berliner Pale Ale. Enlarge Urban Artifact is canning its popular Finn Berliner Pale Ale.
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Urban Artifact is hosting a can launch event at its brewery on 1660 Blue Rock St. on Dec. 9. The brewery first opened its doors in April 2015.
"It took a long time to get to this point, and we're excited it's becoming a reality," co-founder Scotty Hunter told me. "Cans are the highest-quality packaging we can do for our core stuff in the sense that it's impervious to light and there's no concern about oxygen getting in there."
Urban Artifact will begin offering its core lineup in cans ? Finn year-round with a seasonal fruited gose ? and eventually offer barrel-aged sours and limited releases in bottles. The brewery chose bottles for its sours because they'll be bottled with wild yeast, continuing the fermentation process, which could cause cans to explode.
The brewery will use a mobile canning line initially, meaning an outside company will come in and can the beer. Urban Artifact is using printed cans where the label is printed directly onto the aluminum rather than having a plastic label shrink-wrapped onto a blank can. Hunter said the printed cans require a higher initial cost because of the larger orders required, but the higher quality was more representative of the brand.
Finn and Sliderule were chosen to be canned first because they are the two highest-selling beers in the brewery's taproom. Sliderule is part of a seasonal fruited gose series and the springtime will bring a kumquat gose.
Cans will be distributed throughout the Cincinnati and Dayton markets by Cavalier Distributing beginning Dec. 12. They can be found at bars and retailers including Cappy's Loveland, Growler House, Delhi Liquor, Craft Pointe and White Oak Marathon.
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