AKMA Member Hammers Family Birch Awarded $200,000 USDA Grant to Grow Birch Brew Across Alaska

There’s a big difference between harvesting an Alaska resource and building an Alaska industry around it.

Hammers Family Birch is working on the second part.

The AKMA member has been awarded a $200,000 USDA Value-Added Producer Grant to expand manufacturing and distribution of Birch Brew, its wild-fermented Alaska birch sap beverage. Hammers Family Birch will match the grant with another $200,000, creating a $400,000 project focused on getting more Birch Brew manufactured, marketed, stored, distributed, sampled, and onto shelves across Alaska.

That’s exciting news for the company.

It’s also a good example of what value-added manufacturing can look like in Alaska.

Hammers Family Birch taps more than 6,000 birch trees near Talkeetna and collects approximately 100,000 gallons of sap during each spring harvest. That seasonal resource already supports the company’s birch syrup business, and now Birch Brew is creating another market for the same Alaska-grown input.

Instead of harvesting a resource and stopping there, the company is finding more ways to turn it into products people can actually buy.

That’s where manufacturing changes the equation.

The Value Isn’t Just in the Sap

Alaska has no shortage of natural resources.

The harder question has always been how much of the value created from those resources stays here.

Birch sap is a great small-scale example.

The tree is here. The harvest happens here. But the economic impact grows when that sap also gets processed, fermented, bottled, packaged, marketed, warehoused, distributed, sold, and turned into something with a longer commercial life than the raw resource itself.

Birch Brew takes certified organic Alaska birch sap and wild-ferments it into a zero-sugar beverage with live probiotic cultures. The idea itself is rooted in the Latvian heritage of brothers Ted and Alex Hammers, where fermented birch sap has traditionally been consumed as a spring beverage. Bringing that tradition to Alaska was one of the reasons the brothers, along with longtime friend Chris Sorensen, acquired Kahiltna Birchworks in 2023.

But building the product is only the beginning.

A new beverage needs production capacity. It needs packaging. It needs shelf space. It needs consumers who understand what it is. It needs sampling, marketing, storage, and distribution.

Those pieces are exactly where this USDA grant will be used.

Over the next two years, the project will support manufacturing, consumer outreach, retail sampling, marketing, warehousing, and distribution across Alaska.

That makes this more than a grant for making more bottles.

It’s an investment in building the market around the product.

We’ve talked before about the fact that manufacturing capacity alone doesn’t create demand. You can make more of something and still have nowhere for it to go.

Hammers Family Birch is addressing both sides at once: increasing the ability to produce and increasing the ability to reach customers.

That’s important.

Because one of the toughest transitions for a growing Alaska product company is moving from “we can make this” to “we can repeatedly make, distribute, and sell this at scale.”

The second part requires an entirely different set of capabilities.

Growing One Product Can Create Work for Another Alaska Manufacturer

There’s another part of this story we especially like.

Birch Brew is bottled in partnership with Denali Brewing Company in Talkeetna.

That means the growth of one Alaska company is also creating manufacturing activity for another.

This is what a stronger Alaska manufacturing ecosystem can look like.

Not every company needs to own every piece of equipment or build every capability itself.

One business may harvest the resource.

Another may have the bottling equipment.

Another may provide packaging.

Another may move the finished product.

Retailers provide access to customers.

Over time, those connections allow companies to grow without each one recreating an entire supply chain from scratch.

That matters especially in Alaska, where equipment is expensive, freight is expensive, and the market may not be large enough for every small producer to justify building every capability in-house.

Sometimes the better path is partnership.

That’s one reason AKMA spends so much time trying to connect manufacturers, makers, suppliers, and service providers across the state. The more businesses know what already exists here, the more opportunities there are to buy from each other, share capacity, solve problems together, and keep more of the value chain closer to home.

The Hammers Family Birch and Denali Brewing relationship is a good example of that happening naturally.

Birch sap harvested near Talkeetna becomes a manufactured beverage using local production capacity, and the grant will help expand the systems needed to get that product in front of more Alaska customers.

One company’s growth starts creating activity around it.

That’s how an industry becomes more than a collection of individual businesses.

From an Alaska Resource to an Alaska Market

There’s also something worth noticing about where Hammers Family Birch is focusing first.

The grant is specifically aimed at expanding Birch Brew distribution across Alaska.

That may sound obvious, but it gets at an important question for Alaska product companies.

Sometimes growth doesn’t have to begin with immediately shipping farther. It can begin by serving the home market better.

Alaskans already have a connection to birch. The resource is familiar. The product has a clear Alaska story. And there are still plenty of communities, retailers, and consumers around the state that haven’t encountered Birch Brew yet.

Building that Alaska market can help create the sales volume, customer feedback, distribution knowledge, and production experience that support bigger growth later.

It’s also another way to keep more economic activity here.

The resource is harvested here.

The manufacturing happens here.

The bottling partnership is here.

The warehousing and distribution investment will happen here.

The customers, at least for this stage of growth, are here too.

That’s a pretty complete Alaska value chain. And it started with something growing in the forest. That’s what makes this project interesting beyond the dollar amount attached to the grant.

Alaska manufacturing doesn’t always begin with a factory.

Sometimes it begins with asking what else we can make from something we already have.

Congratulations to Hammers Family Birch on the award and on the next stage of growth for Birch Brew. We’re excited to see another AKMA member investing in Alaska manufacturing partnerships and building new value around an Alaska resource.

Source

Hammers Family Birch, “Hammers Family Birch Awarded $200,000 USDA Grant to Expand Birch Brew Across Alaska,” October 9, 2026.