Obstacles Breed Ingenuity
Mike DeGrave, left, and Kyle Stephens
The year was 2020 and Kyle Stephens was CFO of Good City Brewing in Milwaukee. Smaller breweries whose products were featured on local taps were suffering during Covid’s bar and dining closures and carry-out restrictions of alcoholic beverages. Most small- to mid-size breweries find it difficult to sell their beer in cans because can manufacturers require them to buy so many cans at one time, which can impede their cash flow, or they don’t have the warehouse space to store them. And so Kyle, like so many creative, business-minded folks of the time, had an idea: buy cans in bulk and make small quantities accessible to smaller breweries. Turns out, even in post-pandemic times, it is still a good idea, and Kyles’ brain-child, Craft Beverage Warehouse now has two locations, one in Milwaukee and, as of March 2025, one in Denver, CO.
While Craft Beverage Warehouse started distributing blank cans and can carriers, ends and trays in 2020, in 2022 Kyle and his partner, Mike DeGrave, invested in printing machinery to allow the business to also custom print cans for its customers. Previously, customers had to mark their own blank cans with stickers or plastic shrink sleeves. This was not only time consuming but a down-side for the environmentally conscious since cans marked in this way can’t be recycled.
"We're getting busier, and we're able to see some scale savings."
Craft Beverage Warehouse offers customers three sizes of cans and templates to help ease the design and printing process. Their printers can even print on the neck of the can, which most other printers cannot. Physical samples shipped to customers before the batch printing starts ensures customers’ visions look as great in real life as imagined.
“The printing has been the growth area of our business,” Kyle says. So much so that the Milwaukee location added a second printing machine in 2024, with help from MEDC. “With the second printer, we only needed to add one employee to double the printing capacity in Milwaukee. We’re getting busier, and we’re able to see some scale savings,” he adds.
Craft Beverage Warehouse now prints over a million cans a week, between the two locations. What started with Kyle and Mike distributing cans to brewery-industry friends in the Milwaukee area is now a 30+ employee venture with customers throughout the continental U.S. and Alaska. Craft beer remains a large portion of their business, but hemp-based drinks, energy drinks and functional beverages, such as gut-healthy sodas and mushroom waters, are now also calling on the company for their packaging needs.
Craft Beverage Warehouse's printer
Find out more about Craft Beverage Warehouse.