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When South County Brewing expanded from a 4,000-square-foot pole building to a 29,000-square-foot production facility in York, Pennsylvania, co-owner Kellee Terroso watched her utility bills skyrocket—and panic set in. Brewing beer demands massive amounts of energy for heating, cooling, and refrigeration, making utility costs one of the biggest wild cards in their budget.
But after partnering with Shipley Energy, South County Brewing slashed both their electric and natural gas expenses by roughly 50%, giving them the cost stability they needed to focus on what they do best: crafting great beer.
Kellee Terroso: I’m Kellee Terroso and this is my husband Sam.
Sam Terroso: Hi guys, this is South County Brewing here in York, Pennsylvania. I want to give you a little history and background on our organization and how we got to this facility. South County was founded in 2011 by our partner and master brewer J.R. Heaps. J.R. and his wife put South County into a 4,000 square foot pole building down in Fawn Grove, Pennsylvania. So literally I don’t know if you guys know anything about Fawn Grove. It’s a lot of corn fields. A lot of rural living down there
J.R. did a great job. We started small and got involved with when the IPA craze started to hit in the 2000-2014 area. J.R.’s issue wasn’t that South County couldn’t sell the beer he made it said he couldn’t make enough beer to sell, and we’ve been very fortunate to have a culture and a brand and a following that needed a bigger platform. Kelly and I got involved with the business, had been a fan of South County, had gotten to know J.R., and the plan was always to put the brand on a much larger platform.
We went from that 4,000 square foot pole building to 29,000 square feet here. Our production capacity in Fawn Grove was 1,500 barrels a year here it’s 18,000. One thing I do want to mention, and part of the reason we’re here today is to talk a little bit about our partnership with Shipley. This is the pretty part of the business but the real star of the show is the production area out there, and you guys are going to see that a little bit later, but we use a lot of energy. We use a lot of steam, a lot of hot water in the production process for the beer, and then on the flip side of that, it takes a lot of refrigeration and cooling and chilling to not only have the beer ferment and get into the cans and the kegs but then also to keep it cold after we package.
So our relationship with Shipley is important to us because it really gave us some stability in what to expect from a monthly utility spend. And there’s a lot of um instability in the world right now: food prices, hop prices, packaging material, fuel, everything. But one of the great things that we were able to do, and Kelly worked with Greta, is again to give us some long-term stability with energy both with natural gas and electric so we know what to expect on them monthly basis and then just we can smooth out those rough edges and really focus on production in the business.
Kellee Terroso: I mean you could imagine when you’re going from 4,000 square feet to 29,000 it’s very difficult to measure what your utility expenses are going to be in costs incurred. So budgeting was like throwing a dart. I mean you could guess, you could do your best yes, but you certainly couldn’t weigh in all of the other outside factors that you know came into play. So when I started seeing my utility bills literally start to creep up and then just went uh it was off the charts. I panicked. I mean this is like “it’s not going to get any better.” I knew that I talked to my husband about that, and he has a previous relationship with Shipley. [He] got them in here right away, because it’s very difficult to pivot quickly and how do you react fast enough you can change your utility expense. So Greta came in and sat down and offered us a great solution. So we did that. We’ve been able to save about half so I’m really happy to say that we can budget with confidence on our electric bill.
And I will say they were so honest with me when we sat down I couldn’t do anything with the gas they said “we can’t do any better than what you’re getting already but we’ll keep an eye on it for you.” So a month later I get a call from Greta saying “Yep, now’s the time we do something with your gas, and it’s going to go up in September. We can help you with that.” And we went into a contract in our gas prices, so we’re also seeing almost half, about a little more than 50 percent savings in our gas utilities. So we thank Shipley very much for giving us confidence and being able to budget and put a lid on those utility expenses. Because as Sam said, I mean we do heat a lot here. We have to heat and cool this entire restaurant side of it let alone the manufacturing side. So it’s been a good partnership.
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