Fort Worth’s MillerCoors brewery is expanding, but not to produce more beer
Fort Worth’s oldest and largest brewery has taken a bit of a back seat during the past decade, with the explosion of craft breweries and brew pubs opening in North Texas.
But the MillerCoors brewery, which employs about 500 people near Interstate 35W and I-20 in south Fort Worth, is not only still chugging away. It’s expanding.
The company plans to add a new canning line and filtration system to its Fort Worth facility to expand production of its Vizzy hard seltzer, as well as a soon-to-be-released Coors Seltzer.
The Fort Worth brewery opened in 1964, and is known as the birthplace of the extremely popular Miller Lite beer brand in the 1970s. In addition to making hard seltzer, the brewery will continue to manufacture well-known Miller beer brands as well as Coors Light, Blue Moon, Hamm’s and Revolver Blood and Honey.
Hard seltzers are growing in popularity, and are seen as a growth option for mass-market brewers who have watched their largest American lager beer brands decline in popularity as younger drinkers seek different options.
Vizzy seltzers, for example, are billed as more healthful than beer, with 100 calories and an infusion of vitamins in each serving, but also a punch of 5% alcohol. They come in flavors such as pineapple mango and strawberry kiwi.
“As we see our innovations take off, we want to be able to react quickly and take those products in-house when it makes sense from a business perspective,” Brian Erhardt, chief supply chain officer at Molson Coors, which owns the Fort Worth MillerCoors brewery, said in a posting on the company’s blog.
“Vizzy is a good example,” Erhardt said. “Once we saw it take off this year, we made a big bet on an investment in our slim-can capabilities as well as our production lines to better service our customers when it comes to supplying these products.”
MillerCoors officials declined to specify how much the expansion of the Fort Worth brewery would cost — except to say it was a multimillion-dollar project.
The project will quadruple the amount of hard seltzer MillerCoors can produce in-house, officials said.
“While this won’t lead to immediate job increases, it helps build out the facility’s brewing capabilities to produce a wider variety of products,” spokesman Marty Maloney said in an email.
Vizzy has quickly emerged as one of the top-selling hard seltzers in the United States, behind White Claw and Corona Hard Seltzer.
The Fort Worth brewery was built by Carling Brewing and opened in 1964. However, the facility — which now encompasses 155 acres, including 51 acres indoors — was sold to Miller Brewing Co. two years later.
After a long renovation, the Fort Worth brewery reopened in 1969. In 1975, the plant was the first to produce Miller Lite — a brand that revolutionized the U.S. brewing industry by starting a trend toward lighter-bodied beers with fewer calories.
In 1979, the Fort Worth brewery underwent another massive expansion. At one point, it employed about 1,300 people (since then, the process has become more automated, thus fewer employees.)
Using nine production lines in Fort Worth, MillerCoors continues to produce about 7.4 million barrels per year for cans, bottles and kegs, company officials have said.
This story was originally published July 21, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
