Utica, N.Y. — The F.X. Matt (Saranac) brewery in Utica has acquired the rights to produce Guinness Blonde Ale, a beer that has been brewed in Baltimor
Utica, N.Y. — The F.X. Matt (Saranac) brewery in Utica has acquired the rights to produce Guinness Blonde Ale, a beer that has been brewed in Baltimore for the past decade.
It’s the second big beer industry deal in the past month for the Utica brewery, and both involve beers formerly made in Maryland. In May, Matt / Saranac announced it had purchased Flying Dog Brewing Co, of Frederick, Md., and would move production of its beers to Utica.
The more recent deal involves a beer brand owned by Diageo, the London-based parent company of the world-famous Guinness Brewery of Dublin, Ireland. In the past ten years, Guinness had opened a production brewery and visitor’s center / taproom, called the Open Gate Brewery, just outside Baltimore.
The flagship beer brewed at the Maryland brewery was Guinness Blonde, also known as Baltimore Blonde. It is a light and citrusy lager that is much paler in color than the more famous Guinness Stout.
But Diageo announced in April it was closing its large production brewery in Baltimore, while keeping the visitor’s center and taproom open, along with a small pilot brewhouse.
In the new deal, Matt / Saranac agreed to a contract to brew Guinness Blonde for Diageo. The Utica brewery, best known for its Saranac line of craft beer and its Utica Club lager, has also long been a contract brewer for other companies looking for a facility to make their beers. Among the best known contract beers at Matt are those made for the Brooklyn Brewery, which now owns a 20% share of the Utica brewery.
The deal to move Guinness Blonde production to Utica came despite an effort by officials in Maryland to keep the Guinness production brewery there and save more than 100 local jobs, according to a report at WBALTV.com. The Baltimore County executive’s office had offered Diageo $500,000 in incentives to stay in the Baltimore suburb of Halethorpe.
In a statement sent to WBAL this week, Diageo said: “After conducting a due diligence process, which also considered options to keep production of Baltimore Blonde in the state, the supplier that best met the business case and production timeline was FX Matt Brewing Company in New York.”
Matt Brewing was founded by German immigrant F.X. Matt in 1888 as the West End Brewing Co. Matt is the second oldest brewery in New York state (after Genesee in Rochester), and the oldest still owned by its founding family. Current CEO Fred Matt is the great-grandson of F.X. Matt.
It is the third largest brewery in New York, behind only only Genesee Brewery in Rochester and the Anheuser-Busch InBev plant near the Syracuse suburb of Baldwinsville.
Matt Brewing also makes many different beverages under contract for other companies and brands. Many of its products today are hard seltzers, canned cocktails and other products that are not strictly beer.
In one of its most recent ventures into the non-beer category, Matt Brewing partnered with Flying Dog and Boston-based Harpoon Brewing on a line of canned cocktails called Vodka Whips.
In 2021, Matt Brewing completed a $35 million expansion that was included giant new brew kettles and fermenting and storage tanks, along with a new digital/computer-operated control system. That was intended to help it move further into the category of alcoholic products like hard seltzers and canned cocktails. Fred Matt had said at the time beer could soon account for less than half the total output of the brewery.
Don Cazentre writes about craft beer, wine, spirits and beverages for NYup.com, syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Reach him at [email protected], or follow him at NYup.com, on Twitter or Facebook.
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