Photo by Cliff Grassmick

Brewer Eric Luber works the beer filtering system Wednesday at the Oskar Blues facility in Longmont. Oskar Blues is expanding its canning operations.

Oskar Blues, a craft brewery known for its signature pop-top cans of beer, is saying good-bye to the days of hand six-packing in a time of “exponential demand” for its product, company officials said.

Six years after becoming the first craft brewery to exclusively can its hoppy concoctions — with brews such as TenFidy and Old Chub — the Lyons-based company is now frothing over into 22 states and gaining acclaim in the industry.

“Our biggest competitors are ourselves because we are really outpacing our expectations,” said brewery founder Dale Katechis.

He said demand for his can-only brew is growing so rapidly that the brewery is producing more beer than ever.

“Oskar Blues is definitely leading the charge,” said Julia Herz, spokeswoman for the Brewers Association, a Boulder-based nonprofit organization that promotes the $5.3 billion craft brewing industry.

Despite a softening economy and challenges with raw materials, the industry saw an 11 percent increase in microbrew sales in 2007 over the year before.

“The beer industry has been turned upside-down by craft brewers,” said Herz, who expects the can craze to take off industry-wide in coming years.

Oskar Blues began as a brew pub off Main Street in 1999 and started canning beer in 2002 using a table-top machine capable of canning a few beers at a time. The company expanded in April and has invested $3 million in a 35,000-square-foot second brewery at 1800 Pike Road in Longmont.

“We’ve since doubled our capacity from moving from Lyons,” Katechis said. “We underestimated ourselves.”

The original brewery produced 1,168 barrels of beer in 2003 — a number that climbed to 12,409 barrels in 2007. When the company opened the second brewing facility, it quickly produced 27,000 barrels — its maximum capacity — prompting Oskar Blues to purchase five more brewing tanks this week, which is expected to double current production.

The brewery is also responding to demand by becoming the only craft beer company in the country equipped with an automatic six-packing machine, which is part of a new canning system that packs and ships beer faster. Packing 160 cans a minute, the new system extends shelf life and provides maximum freshness, officials said.

“Some of our peers said this idea of a craft beer in a can would never work, and a craft beer lover would never stoop to drinking beer in a can,” said brewery spokesman Marty Jones.

Jones insists canned beer harbors the true flavor of beer and eliminates two of the biggest evils against brews: oxygen and light.

“We got all this crazy growth when everybody said we would never fly,” Jones said.