Garage Talk About Garage Beer
You’re going to start thinking I’m on the Garage Beer payroll with the amount I talk about this brand, but I assure you that’s not the case. I just remain fascinated by all the components that are coming together including its 1) local craft brewery origin, 2) spin-off into it’s own platform, 3) with separate leadership, strategy, and aspirations 4) a name that resonates nationally, and 5) investment from two of the most popular athletes in the US, one of whom is who is dating Taylor Swift. When you’re growing like crazy and aligned with a hot commodity like the Kelce brothers, the news cycle never seems to quit and a couple related stories just broke that warrant a reaction.
New Heights, Indeed
Garage Beer announced their investment from the Kelce Brothers in June 2024. The partnership stood out as a fascinating, new school strategy to speed up the early brand building steps of awareness, trial, adoption, and loyalty in the most competitive beer category. Besides being stars on the field, Travis and Jason have forgone the traditional media route by building their own platform with a weekly podcast called New Heights that’s grown to 2.4 Million+ followers on YouTube alone.
Companies like Anheuser-Busch and Molson Coors strike endorsement deals with celebrities on the regular, but those relationships don’t necessarily offer the same feeling of pride, ownership, and potential upside for the endorsor. Unlike most celebrity beers, it’s important to differentiate that the Kelces aren’t THE brand like Troy Aikman’s Eight or Stone Cold Steve Austin’s Broken Skull IPA. Instead, the brothers are investors with a powerful megaphone that can bring instant credibility to Garage Beer, giving the brand the ability to move on without them some day, if needed.
According to the website Zoomph which sets out to measure and value the digital world, Travis and Jason Kelce’s podcast New Heights earned more than 1.92 million views per episode as of March 2024. The episode following the Chiefs’ Super Bowl win reached 3.7 million views with their interview with Jason Kelce’s wife Kylie topping the list at over 8.1 million views. These are massive numbers beyond what most people realize, and don’t even include all the podcast downloads.
In late August, the time invested in building this viewership paid off in a big way when it was announced that the brothers inked a $100M deal with Wondery+, the Amazon owned podcast studio and network that’s setting out to compete with Spotify by aligning with popular shows. Other partners on the platform include Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert, Dr. Death, Suspect, Business Wars, and Even the Rich.
My first reaction to the headline was that this could actually be bad for viewership of New Heights and thus the exposure for Garage Beer. I incorrectly assumed after seeing the $100M price tag that Amazon was getting exclusivity over the show for their podcast network and on Amazon Prime for the video version. Having honestly never heard of Wondery myself, I figured many others would be in the same boat.
It turns out that Wondery receives the rights to sell the ads and sponsorships for the show, while gaining the ability to give early, ad-free access to users of their platform, but they won’t have and perhaps don’t even want exclusivity given the earning potential of selling ads across all platforms. What an impressive win for the Kelces, striking while the iron is hot and extending their earning potential beyond the football field. For Garage Beer, the company will want to ramp up production and distribution to eventually match the wide reach of New Heights.
Tapping into Founders Brewing
As a brewery, before you submit cans to a manufacturer for printing, you get approval from the US Treasury’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) to ensure compliance. That’s often many months before you actually plan to package that beer as a number of art approval and piloting steps have to follow before eventually making it onto the plant’s production schedule.
The PR challenge is that once that label is approved, everything on it becomes public information. Some beer blogs use these label approvals as a source of early information, sometimes before the brewery was prepared to or interested in announcing.
Two blogs whose work includes breaking news via label approvals are:
Beginning in August 2024, new versions of the same Garage Beer labels began hitting the approval wire at the TTB, but with a notable difference: Grand Rapids, MI
When you dig in behind the scenes, you can confirm that the label indeed belongs to Founders Brewing, who does business under the parent company: Canal Street Brewing Co LLC.
And then you can confirm via Michigan’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs that Canal Street Brewing Co is now able to do business as Garage Beer.
A few outlets have covered this news, including This Week’s Beer News from GuysDrinkingBeer.com, which later led to this paywalled Crain’s Grand Rapid article that includes Garage Beer’s co-owner Andy Sauer acknowledging that they’re “very early in our relationship with Founders so we are not at a place to comment too much.” Founders/Mahou USA then told MLive.com that “nothing has been formalized yet — so we’re not ready to share more on that at this time.”
It drives marketers crazy that TTB labels have to become public so far before plans otherwise need to be set in stone, but such is life. At Rev, I often announce our Deep Wood Series and show off the can mock-ups before we have TTB approval on them so that we get to be the ones that break the story. If we have to make a change, then so be it. In this case, you’ve gotta believe that the important aspects of a deal are indeed finalized if there’s DBAs and TTB approvals, but I can totally imagine that there’s either small details or public relations work still be ironed out.
In the mean time, here’s some reactions and reasons to believe that this deal makes a lot of sense.
Garage Beer outgrew the excess capacity at Braxton Brewing, the Covington, KY craft brewery that the brand was born in and sold/spun out of. They began moving some production to Brewdog USA in Columbus, where Garage Beer is now based out of but perhaps that’s not proving to be the long term fit they need.
Founders has a world class facility in centrally-located Grand Rapids. Regardless of how you feel about them or beers like All Day IPA or KBS, the production quality, talent, systems, and standards in Grand Rapids are tough to match.
The output of Founders’ own brands has fallen significantly over the last 4 years making them a great fit to contract brew, especially for a brand-only beer platform that could become a perfect acquisition target in the future to get that volume back up.
Founders has been selling Solid Gold for awhile now and while the brand must sell well enough to have stuck around since its 2018 launch, its probably not going to ever be a national phenomenon like Garage Beer has the potential to be. Garage Beer would make a nice compliment to the Founders portfolio some day.
Most importantly of all, Founders has national distribution in place. Garage Beer is currently in 13 states but intends to be nationwide over the coming years. Aligning with Founders can make that complex process exponentially simpler, faster, and cheaper, not to mention the continuous cost benefits from combining freight, logistics, and possibly even sales someday, in addition to the more obvious production relationship.
Garage Beer is a fun example of small brand, going big, and making moves quickly. Their connections to two of the NFL’s biggest personalities and even an indirect connection to Taylor Swift make it an extra fascinating story to follow. But beer isn’t sold on podcasts or YouTube, it’s sold in stores and needs to flow through the complex three tier system to reach a national audience. Aligning with Founders Brewing for production and potentially distribution alignment has the ability to execute the hurry-up offense that Garage Beer will need to march across the country.
Those Founders decrease numbers are 👀👀👀 With global beer companies divesting their craft brands left and right, I'm spending Sunday having some fun considering whether the Kelce bros. would be interested in kicking the tires on an offer to purchase Founders/Avery outright...
Wow, literally stole the name from garage brewing and changed it to beer.... pathetic