TailGate Brewery founder and owner Wesley Keegan does not advise that other brewers mimic his Nashville-based brewery’s portfolio strategy, simply because it doesn’t make much sense.
Throughout TailGate’s decade in operation, its flagship offerings have been a peanut butter milk stout and an orange wheat beer, neither of which were created with the goal of becoming the brewery’s lead style.
“[Orange Wheat] was never intended to be our flagship, but it just kept outselling everything else, including our previous flagship, which was a similar type of story,” Keegan said. “We made a seasonal peanut butter milk stout, and then that outsold everything. And I know your traditional format is you have your yellow beer and your IPA, but for us, we had this niche winter beer that we tried discontinuing, but people were like, ‘No, you’re not discontinuing that.’”
The popularity of Peanut Butter Milk Stout – Orange Wheat’s predecessor as flagship – was undeniable, until it wasn’t.
“It just kept growing, year after year, month after month,” Keegan said. “It was just linear, it wasn’t seasonal, but it was five years of just linear growth, and then it started experiencing some seasonality, and we were like, ‘Well, hey, this isn’t the right way to create a core offering.’”
The move to focus year-round efforts on Orange Wheat as the lead style needed buy-in with TailGate’s sales reps and wholesaler partners, who had been pleased with Peanut Butter Milk Stout’s performance.
“Your core shouldn’t be your milk stout. That was a big conversation with our sales team and our distributors,” Keegan told Brewbound. “Everybody looked at it as like, ‘Hey, you got this win.’ That’s not a healthy menu. It needs to be these other products.”
Other beers in TailGate’s year-round portfolio include Tropic Wizard juicy IPA, TENN Golden Lager and Howdy Cloudy hazy session IPA. In addition to craft beer, TailGate also produces hard cider, and is Nashville’s first cidery.
Many of TailGate’s choices reveal a business strategy that zags where most craft brewers zig, particularly in the industry’s tumultuous half-decade since the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a strategy that has proved fruitful for the 10-year-old brewery, which celebrated its anniversary last month.
At a time where many craft breweries have shuttered locations and some have expanded geographic distribution in an attempt to juice volume, TailGate only ships its beer within Tennessee’s borders. The brewery has opened nine taprooms in its home state, six of them in its hometown alone.
Keegan finds inspiration in New Glarus Brewing, the 11th largest craft brewery in the country by volume, which famously only distributes in its home state of Wisconsin. In 2023, New Glarus shipped 228,132 barrels of beer within the Badger State, according to the most recent data available from the Brewers Association. (TailGate does not make its production data public.)
When TailGate opened in 2015, the concept of localized craft breweries and taprooms was just beginning to take off. Keegan decided that keeping close local ties with retailers and consumers would be a cornerstone for TailGate.
“I saw a little bit of the writing on the walls. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and as everything was growing and was hyped, craft beer was so local,” Keegan said. “If you weren’t local, then you weren’t playing. So it was just like, let me just focus where I can get, where I can drive, where I can put eyes, where I can shake hands with people, that kind of thing, because it was a production/distribution brewery first.”
TailGate has its sights set on filling out Tennessee before it ever considers going beyond statelines.
“Tennessee is our focus, and there’s a whole lot of state left,” Keegan said. “People that haven’t been to Tennessee don’t really realize it, because if you look on a map, and it looks so small, but east to west it’s just a really long state, and we’re smack dab in the middle.
“We’ve gotten into Chattanooga, which is two hours away,” he continued. “There’s East Tennessee. There’s West Tennessee, there’s a little bit north of us, and there’s a lot of opportunities still.”
Taprooms Turned Pizza Palaces & the Target Demographic
That close-to-home mentality also mostly applies to TailGate’s nine own-premise locations. Six are within Nashville itself (Headquarters, Music Row, Germantown, East Nashville, South Nashville and Nashville International Airport).
Farther afield, TailGate has locations in Hendersonville (20 miles northeast of downtown Nashville), Murfreesboro (about 40 miles southeast) and Chattanooga (130 miles southeast, near the Georgia border).
While TailGate considers itself a distribution brewery first and foremost, its constellation of taprooms offer a differentiated source of revenue (“Batman’s got to have Robin, right?” Keegan quipped), along with several other benefits, including touchpoints for consumers.
Nashville’s booming tourism industry tends to funnel visitors within a defined geographic area downtown, where none of TailGate’s taprooms are located, so the brewery’s taproom clientele leans heavily local.
“We make our living with the locals and then the beer tourists,” Keegan explained.
He views TailGate’s taprooms as craft beer versions of Apple Stores: stylized, brand-immersive experiences to taste new offerings, but not necessarily purchase a 12-pack.
“I use all Apple products personally, but if I’ve been to an Apple Store four or five times in my life, it’s because I’m trying a different product,” Keegan said. “But I never buy it at the store. I buy it at whatever retailer or online that I’m typically shopping anyway.”
Another example of TailGate zagging instead of zigging: Its target taproom demographic is also the Target demographic, meaning women in their 20s to 40s, who also tend to frequent the mass retailer, Keegan said. The majority of TailGate’s 250 workers – who received 100% paid healthcare – also fall within the same demographic, Keegan said.
TailGate ensures that each facet of its taprooms adds up to a curated experience to keep these guests, who may not often see themselves reflected in other breweries, coming back.
“We work really, really hard to make sure that everybody knows that they’re welcomed,” Keegan said. “It’s a safe place to work, it’s a safe place to visit. We’re deliberate about what goes on TV, what doesn’t go on TV. We want to be an oasis, and we want to reflect that for both the team and the guests. And I think that’s really helped encourage people to continue to come in.”
TailGate’s pizza offerings include leveled-up versions of traditional pies, including whipped ricotta pizza, burrata margarita pizza and spicy vodka pizza, which tops spicy vodka sauce with pepperoni, shredded mozzarella, fresh mozzarella, ricotta and hot honey. Other TailGate pizzas draw inspiration from far beyond Italy, like the Nashville hot chicken mac and cheese pizza, Mexican street corn pizza, pickle pizza and birria pizza.
“We treat all of our different business segments the same,” Keegan said. “I got into this for beer, but if I just offered pizza because we offer pizza, it’s going to be a ‘90s brewpub. If we’re going to do pizza, we’re going to do it with the same care and consideration that we do for beer. Those types of things have paid off for us big time.”
Distribution Evolution
Last year, TailGate signed with Lipman Brothers, a total bev-alc wholesaler serving Middle and Eastern Tennessee. The move “resulted in a surge of growth in the fall, and a 120% increase in grocery, doubling placements in retailers across Tennessee,” according to a press release.
“Having a distributor that actually does care to deliver us and put us where we’re selling into made a pretty big difference right out of the gate,” Keegan said.
Lipman Brothers is TailGate’s third distributor partner in its 10-year-run, and Keegan feels the brewery has finally found its home.
“They all tell you, ‘Hey, I can deliver the beer.’ But what happens after? ‘I don’t have any control over that.’ Yeah, fine, but can you actually deliver the beer? Can you do that part, please? And Lipman has,” he said, recalling conversations with prior partners. “They got our brand, and they delivered.”
Coinciding with TailGate and Lipman Brothers’ partnership was the brewery’s packaging expansion to include 19.2 oz. single-serve cans for the first time, which helped TailGate enter more gas stations, convenience stores, grocery stores and Nashville’s all-important music venues.
TailGate is in good company by adding singles – last year, the format was the only craft package to grow both dollar sales and volume, according to the Brewers Association’s annual packaging report, released last week.
A Business-First Philosophy
Keegan studied major global brands and retailers as he worked to open TailGate – Starbucks, Target, Toyota and Costco – and not craft breweries.
“Our wage structure is highly modeled after Costco – everybody loves working for this company, let’s learn how they’re doing it,” he said. “I’ve been really, really intentional to look at things that are working in our industry and look at things that are not working.
“I don’t understand why everybody just wants to copy each other and go the same direction on literally everything,” he continued.
As TailGate’s sole owner, Keegan approached building the brewery as a craft-flavored business endeavor, rather than a passion project – something he said drew derision from peers in craft’s more buoyant times.
“When beer hype and snobbery was at its peak, it would just be dismissed. It’s like, ‘Oh, fuck him. He’s just a business guy,’” he said, recalling past conversations. “Well, no, I’m in this because I like beer. If I was a business guy, I would have done literally anything else because you can make a lot more money doing something else. But you do have to pay the bills.”