Stone Brewing production leaves Richmond as Sapporo takes over plant

Stone Brewing’s Fulton plant at 4300 Williamsburg Avenue is losing the name that made it one of Richmond’s most visible beer landmarks. After Duvel Moortgat USA agreed to acquire Stone from Sapporo Holdings, Stone beers will no longer be manufactured in Richmond after a brief transition period, and production is expected to continue only through May before the site shifts fully to Sapporo.

The change marks the end of Stone’s Richmond era and the start of a different identity for the building. The public-facing taproom is set to lose the Stone name as well, with plans to rebrand and retrofit it as a Sapporo taproom later this year if final planning moves ahead smoothly. What once served as Stone’s East Coast production and distribution center is being recast as Sapporo USA’s main U.S. hub.

Stone opened the Richmond facility in February 2016 in the Fulton neighborhood, a 200,000-square-foot brewery built with major public backing. Richmond and Virginia offered more than $25 million in incentives to land the project, including a $5 million Governor’s Opportunity Fund grant and $250,000 from the Agriculture and Forestry Industries Development Fund. The plant later expanded in 2022, when Stone added four 1,000-barrel tanks and raised annual capacity from 150,000 barrels to 200,000.

Sapporo kept investing in the site after taking control of the brand. In 2023, the company said it was putting $40 million into Richmond to ramp up production. Recent figures show why the plant is being folded into Sapporo’s network rather than shut down: the operation employed about 160 people locally, and roughly 70 percent of recent output was Sapporo beer, with Stone making up the other 30 percent.

That split makes the rebrand feel less like a sudden pivot than a formal recognition of how the plant already functioned. Sapporo said its beer products in the U.S. are brewed in the U.S. and Canada, and the company dates its roots to 1876, making it the oldest beer brand in Japan. Stone, meanwhile, will live on under the Firestone Walker Brewing Company umbrella within Duvel’s portfolio, a reminder that the brand and the brewery site are now heading in different directions.

The Richmond facility has also been part of the city’s labor story. In August 2024, workers publicly launched a union drive seeking higher pay, more consistent scheduling and better working conditions. National Labor Relations Board records showed the proposed bargaining unit covered brewery, warehouse, packaging, quality assurance, maintenance, truck driving and taproom roles at 4300 Williamsburg Avenue and 943 Airport Drive. For Greater Fulton and the surrounding beer scene, the change is bigger than a corporate shuffle: Richmond is keeping the tanks, but losing the Stone identity that helped define the site from the start.