Local brewery aims for 100% growth at new home
Some kids grow up wanting to be lawyers. Others aspire to be teachers. Still others choose to follow their parents into the family business or to pursue independent careers.
Few, however, dream they will brew beer for a living.
Luckily for frequenters of Westchester bars, Scott Vaccaro was one of those precious few.
With Vaccaro, 33, at the helm, the Captain Lawrence Brewing Co. is set to christen its new home in Elmsford this month, enabling the company to brew five times as much beer as it could at its Pleasantville location.
Now six years into the brewery”™s existence, Vaccaro ”“ a new father, to boot ”“ said there is more work than ever as he looks to make Captain Lawrence a household name among Westchesterites. In addition to restaurants, the beer is available in some retail stores.
When he does take a moment to step back and look at how far he personally and the company as a whole have collectively come, though, he said the feeling is one of awe.
“I feel very blessed. I feel very fortunate. There”™s not a day that goes by that I”™m not amazed,” he said.
Captain Lawrence Brewing Co. will begin to produce beer at the new location and simultaneously stop brewing in Pleasantville Jan. 9, with the Elmsford tasting room tentatively scheduled to open Jan. 19.
Local beginnings
The thought of home-brewing beer first occurred to Vaccaro as a senior in high school in 1995 when he visited a friend”™s house and noticed the father making a home brew on the kitchen stovetop.
Fast-forward 11 years, and Vaccaro”™s journey took him from the family”™s home on Captain Lawrence Drive in South Salem, to the University of California at Davis, where he majored in fermentation science, and to the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in Chico, Calif., before he came back East to work at the Colorado Brewery and Steakhouse in Danbury, Conn.
After the Colorado Brewery closed, Vaccaro approached his family with the idea of founding a brewery, and on the eve of the 2006 Super Bowl the Captain Lawrence Brewing Co. opened its tasting room to customers.
Market saturation the goal
The challenge since then has been convincing bar and restaurant owners ”“ and their customers ”“ to rally behind the new brewery.
“I remember very clearly: Before opening, my father said, ”˜I know you can make great beer, but can you sell it?”™” Vaccaro said.
So far, the answer has been “yes.”
In the company”™s first year, it brewed 600 barrels of beer (one barrel equals 31 gallons). In 2011, some 9,000 barrels of Captain Lawrence beer were produced and Vaccaro said with plans to start packaging beer in 12-ounce bottles this year, total output could double by the end of 2012.
“We”™re hoping for 100 percent growth with the bottles,” he said. Currently some 98 percent of the beer sold by the brewery is in draft form, but with the move to expand bottling operations that the new facility offers, Vaccaro said he hopes to even out the ratio of draft to bottled beer.
“It depends on when we get them out. If we start in the second quarter, we”™d like to get to 70-30 (draft to bottled) and the next year get up to 50-50 but it could happen faster.”
With close to 1,000 client accounts, Vaccaro said the temptation is to expand marketing efforts to include areas further away from the New York metropolitan area but for now the only concern is increasing product saturation in current markets.
“We”™re fully in the lower 15 counties (of New York). Manhattan is our biggest market. But the farther you get from home, the less ”˜local”™ matters.”