Happy Birthday SweetWater

Friday marks the 15th anniversary of SweetWater Brewing Company. SweetWater started as a dream of college roommates and Co-Founders, Freddy Bensch and Kevin McNerney who had a bigger hankering for beer than they did books, dedicating their studies to the business of brewing. SweetWater was their chance to bring a new West coast style of unpasteurized brewing to Atlanta’s beer scene.

Since its founding Feb. 17, 1997, SweetWater Brewery has grown to become the 27th largest craft brewers in the nation selling more than 95,000 barrels of its brews in 2011 throughout six states in the Southeast including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina.

The kegs don’t stop flowing there. Fast approaching is the official opening of the brewery’s expansion project which will quintuple brewing capacity and help expand SweetWater’s footprint to eventually cover greater portions of the Southeast and mid-Atlantic within the next few years. SweetWater officially broke ground on the expansion in June of 2011 and will be unveiling the space and more details on this 88,000-square-foot project later this spring.

To celebrate 15 sweet years, the SweetWater gang has brewed up something special and promises to blow the doors off this anniversary. To start, Bensch invited McNerney back to help conceive a special anniversary ale, appropriately titled 15 Years of Heady Beers.

The ale is a recreated version of their original Extra Special Bitter (ESB) recipe with a “big ol’ bump” pushing the beer into a barley wine status. The brew is on shelves for a limited-time throughout early March, and a video documenting the creation featuring Bensch and McNerney can be found here. 

And what better way of celebrating a brewery’s birthday than with a beer-baked birthday cake? SweetWater teamed up with local bakery, Perfect Wedding Cake, to create a massive 5-feet-tall by 3-feet-wide chocolate cake specially designed to resemble the 15 Years of Heady Beers bottle and packaging. The cake recipe called for 60-ounces of a stout brew. SweetWater suitably served up its Happy Ending seasonal chock-full of hops and chocolate notes to be included in the bake mix.

For more on SweetWater’s history, details on beer fleet and brewery tours, visit here.

- SweetWater Brewing Company contributed to this story