Colorado
How Colorado breweries broke our 36-inch square supply
Request pricing
Everything marked with a star is required. The rest helps us quote faster.
Colorado has somewhere north of 400 licensed breweries. Almost all of them move kegs. Kegs, for entirely sensible reasons, live on a 36" square pallet.
Nationally, the 36" x 36" square is a niche footprint — a low single-digit percentage of pallets in circulation. On the Front Range it is one of the three sizes we are asked about most, and it is the one we most often have to say no to.
Why the keg square exists
A half-barrel keg is about 16" in diameter. Four of them fit on a 36" square with the rims just clear of each other and nothing overhanging. Put them on a 48" x 40" and you have four kegs rattling around in a footprint that wastes 30% of its area, or you fit six and exceed what most keg-handling equipment is set up for.
The square also rotates. In a packaging hall where a pallet gets spun to face a filler, a square footprint behaves identically in every orientation, which removes an entire class of small daily annoyances.
The supply problem, in one chart
| Quarter | Intake (supply) | Orders (demand) | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 (Jan–Mar) | 118 | 71 | Surplus |
| Q2 (Apr–Jun) | 94 | 142 | Shortage |
| Q3 (Jul–Sep) | 77 | 131 | Shortage |
| Q4 (Oct–Dec) | 111 | 56 | Surplus |
The pattern is obvious once you see it and completely counter-intuitive before you do. Breweries need pallets most in spring and summer, when they are producing hardest — and that is exactly when they are not returning cores, because every pallet they own is under a keg somewhere.
Supply arrives in January, when taprooms are quiet and the cellar gets cleared. Demand arrives in May. There is a four-month phase shift between the two halves of the same loop.
What we do about it
- We buy in winter and hold. Roughly 1,400 keg squares sit in our yard from February to April doing nothing, which is inventory cost we accept because the alternative is disappointing brewers in June.
- We build new from reclaimed stock. A 36" square is a simple pallet and we can build it from recovered deck boards in the quiet months.
- We run a want-list. Every keg square that enters the yard is flagged before it reaches the sort line.
- We say no early. If we cannot supply in the window, we say so in the first email rather than in week three.
What breweries can do
- Forecast in January, not in May. Tell us roughly what you will need for the season and we will hold it. There is no charge for this and it is the single thing that solves the problem.
- Return cores in the quiet months. Every square that comes back to us in February is one we can sell you in June.
- Consider a co-op arrangement. Three breweries in Fort Collins share a standing programme with us. Their combined forecast is smoother than any of theirs individually, and they all pay less.
- Specify chamfered decks. Keg rims chew lead boards. A chamfered edge roughly halves the damage rate and costs a few cents a unit.
- Do not buy 48x40 as a substitute. It seems like a saving. It produces keg damage, handling problems and a pallet that never fits the cellar racking.
None of this is a complaint. Colorado's brewing industry is one of the most enjoyable customer bases in the yard, and the odd-size problem is a good problem — it exists because an industry standardised on something that works well for its actual job rather than on whatever was easiest to buy.