Routes to market
With the help of their 20+ man agency Elastic Chris Bayliss and Daniel Rowntree launched Craft Beer Rising, a beer trade festival for the modern brewer and the new consumers who were discovering the joys of more flavoursome beer. Now coming into its sixth year CBR is the event of the year on everyones calendar, whether you’re a micro brewery or an international player.
The success of CBR gave Daniel, Chris and their business partner Matthew Williams the motivation to launch their own beer brand Big Hug Brewing. Unlike the majority of their contemporaries in the craft beer industry at the time, who go for sizeable upfront investment to cover the overhead of a bricks and mortar operation, the Big Hug team instead decided to contract out the production of their own brand beer to a network of specially selected breweries.
It was this flexibility that gave them the time to focus on building the brand and the networks required to drive sales of their specialist brewed craft beers. As a result they’ve been able to compete at a national level by building a brand which is based on quality, consistency, style and diversity.
“Our aim from the outset was to combine the to” says Daniel “whilst always having one eye on our growth and scalability and the other on our eventual exit. With now well over 1,700 UK brewers you have to be competitive, and know the end game, ours has been to partner with a big industry player who can help take our brand to next level”.
But at the start it was not all plain sailing for the budding beer entrepreneurs with an idea to contract brew but no clear path or process to follow. There were a number of stumbling blocks, false starts and frustrations ahead for the team.
“First of all where do you start?” says Chris. “Back then, as is still the case today, there is no directory listing out the contact details, equipment lists, skill sets and availability of contract brewers. I remember spending hours calling brewery after brewery having the same conversation. What’s your minimum run? Can you brew to this specification? What materials do you use? Whats your price per unit etc etc. And then when you think you’ve nailed a potential brewer you find out they can only do one run or they’re snowed under until after Christmas”.
“Yeah the first two years were certainly challenging” recalls Chris. “Once we were up and running with our first group of breweries we then had a myriad of scheduling issues, payment issues, quality control issues and trying to marry up packaging and distribution across multiple breweries working on multiple brews, for multiple buyers was at times a bit of a logistical nightmare”.
Having gone through a rigorous vetting procedure in order to ensure their beer styles remain consistent, the team have settled on West Berkshire Brewery to brew their core range.
“Although the model we’ve adopted for Big Hug means we sacrifice margin, the upside is that we have very little overhead and costs which gives us ultimate flexibility to scale up and expand internationally. Scale also allows us to drive down our margin even further as we are able to commit to bigger brews with bigger breweries.”
So where does BrewBroker fit into all this? During the early stages of Big Hug, listening in on the trials and tribulations of the Big Hug team was Toby Chantrell, Elastic’s Strategy Director and now co-founder of BrewBroker. Toby would often be in the same room as Dan and Chris as they were pulling their collective hair out, so was there to witness first hand the issues they were facing. “I just remember thinking at the time” says Toby “contract brewing is becoming more and more prominent in the market, other people must be facing the same hurdles as the guys are, so they’re must be a better way of doing this’.
As it turns out there wasn’t, so BrewBroker was born.
Our online marketplace will enable any business or individual to buy and sell brewing services, whether they’re a budding brewer experimenting with their first batch or an established brewery struggling to scale-up production.
We will be show casing the system at Craft Beer Rising at the end of February 2018.
