INDIANAPOLIS — Breweries in Indiana, and across the country, had to adapt in 2020 because of the pandemic. Now, they’ve had to adapt again.
With a lot of bars and restaurants closed for most of last year, breweries and other beverage companies focused on producing more drinks in cans to sell in the stores.
“In August 2019, Sun King utilized 600,000 beverages cans,” Clay Robinson, co-CEO of Sun King Brewery in Indianapolis, told Inside Indiana Business. “In August 2020, we utilized 1.2 million cans.”
He said breweries and companies focused on cans, not just throughout the United States, but throughout the world. However, that threw “a wrench in the works,” Robinson said.
There is now a shortage of aluminum cans.
“There’s not enough run time on machines that make cans, so what a lot of beverage manufacturers have had to do in order to keep their primary packages flowing is kind of shed some of their ancillary brands and really focus on core products,” Robinson said.
That means not as much production of specialty products, meaning you might not see your favorite seasonal beer as much.
He added that even though bars and restaurants are opening back up, he doesn’t anticipate the sales of aluminum cans to go back to pre-pandemic levels.
