When it comes to the business of building fruit-forward beers, sourcing ingredients is about more than finding a supplier that can deliver the right quantity at the right price. Fruit varieties can behave differently depending on where they’re grown, how they’re processed and what happens when fermented. Understanding those differences can help breweries improve quality while making smarter purchasing decisions.
At Urban Artifact, that understanding has developed through years of experimentation, supplier relationships and a willingness to look beyond the most obvious sources.
“Early on, it started just trying to find affordable fruit,” explained Bret Kollmann-Baker, the brewery’s chief of brewing operations. “It was just a ton of cold calls and finding suppliers.”
The brewery eventually found a fruit broker it could trust, creating a foundation for a sourcing strategy that goes beyond price comparisons. That relationship has helped the Cincinnati brewery and beverage maker find alternatives when a particular fruit is difficult to obtain and evaluate options from different growing regions.
“From there, it’s just a matter of just getting creative and having the patience to source everything,” Kollmann-Baker said.
That patience matters for others in the industry that rely on ingredients with varying availability, pricing and characteristics. Rather than assume a fruit from one region will perform the same as fruit from another, Urban Artifact evaluates alternatives and determines which sources best fit its products.
When searching for blackberries, for example, Kollmann-Baker said the brewery has compared fruit from the Pacific Northwest with options from Mexico, Scotland and Serbia. Samples helped the team identify differences that weren’t necessarily apparent from the name of the fruit alone.
“Mexican blackberry actually isn’t that great because it’s too hot and the fruit just doesn’t develop well,” he said. “And Scotland’s actually the opposite, where the fruit gets all flabby and there’s not enough acidity. But the Serbian stuff is amazing.”
It shows that supplier selection shouldn’t end with availability, specifications or a basic number like price per pound. Samples and production trials can reveal whether an ingredient delivers the characteristics a recipe needs. When a preferred source becomes unavailable or too expensive, having already evaluated alternatives can also make the purchasing decision less reactive later on as well. That doesn’t mean breweries need to test every possible source of every ingredient. It means identifying the ingredients that have the greatest impact on a product’s identity and investing the time to understand their differences. A fruit’s name may remain the same on a purchase order, but its performance in a finished beer can vary. Treating sourcing as part of recipe development gives you more control over the result.
Understanding the ingredient also means understanding what processing can do to it.
Urban Artifact has learned that different fruits benefit from different approaches before they reach the fermentation tank. Strawberries, for instance, can develop undesirable aromas during fermentation. Kollmann-Baker said cooking the fruit beforehand helps drive off precursor compounds associated with those aromas. The process also darkens the color, helping address the pale, fleshy appearance that can result when strawberry flesh is mixed with beer.
Blueberries present another challenge. Their familiar sweetness and tartness don’t necessarily translate into a pronounced blueberry flavor after fermentation removes much of the sweetness. Kollmann-Baker said cooking the fruit more extensively, similar to preparing a compote, can help deepen its flavor and color.
Raspberries require a different approach.
“You don’t want to cook them very much,” Kollmann-Baker said. Urban Artifact looks for sources that receive, at most, a light pasteurization before freezing. Ideally, the fruit is pureed and frozen without heat treatment, allowing the brewery to handle the pasteurization process itself.
The brewery uses a dedicated fruit cooker designed to handle unpasteurized fruit, allowing the team to pasteurize it at a controlled, relatively low temperature.
That creates a practical question: Is the convenience of a ready-to-use ingredient worth the potential loss of control over its characteristics? The answer will depend on the beer, production capacity and cost structure, but it should be an intentional decision rather than a default purchasing practice.
Developing that knowledge takes time, and Urban Artifact’s scale has helped it justify the effort. Kollmann-Baker estimated the brewery uses between 500,000 and 1 million pounds of fruit annually, depending on the year and product mix.
Even at that volume, however, he doesn’t consider Urban Artifact a major player in the broader fruit industry.
“The fruit world is crazy,” he said. “The movers and shakers in the fruit world are moving millions upon millions of pounds a year. We’re barely scratching the surface.”
READ MORE: Why Urban Artifact Looked to the Stars for Its Next Fruiting Innovation
That perspective matters for breweries considering how much influence their purchasing volume gives them. A substantial ingredient expense for a craft brewery may represent only a small portion of a supplier’s overall business. Breweries shouldn’t assume that their volume alone will secure the best pricing, priority access or preferential treatment. Instead, relationships can help bridge that gap.
Kollmann-Baker said he believes the brewery’s broker supports Urban Artifact partly because of their personal relationship and the broker’s interest in seeing the business succeed. That trust gives the brewery a reliable starting point for finding fruit, exploring new sources and working through availability challenges.
Now, breweries shouldn’t try to depend on personal goodwill instead of commercial agreements. Rather, a trusted supplier can be a valuable partner in a sourcing strategy, particularly when the relationship encourages collaboration and a willingness to search for solutions. Breweries still need to understand their costs, establish expectations and evaluate whether the arrangement will remain viable as their needs change.
For smaller breweries, that may mean prioritizing a handful of dependable suppliers instead of constantly chasing marginally lower prices. For breweries with more purchasing power, it may mean developing multiple qualified sources for critical ingredients so that one disruption doesn’t force an expensive change in the recipe.
