Drink Craft Beer Acquires Pintley Assets

Drink Craft Beer LLC, a Boston-based beer festival organizer, has purchased various assets of The Pintley Company, an events business that helped craft breweries promote their products through various meetups across the United States.

Specific financial terms of the transaction, which closed earlier this month, were not disclosed, Drink Craft Beer co-founder Jeff Wharton told Brewbound.

As part of the deal, Drink Craft Beer has acquired email lists and several trademarks previously owned by The Pintley Company, which will be dissolved, Wharton said.

“It didn’t make sense for us to buy the company, but there were certain assets we wanted to leverage,” Wharton said.

Drink Craft Beer, which hosts roughly 7,500 attendees across three Boston beer festivals annually, will benefit most from acquiring Pintley’s email lists, Wharton said.

“It will be a big boon for us,” he said, noting that Drink Craft Beer would now be able to reach at least 100,000 more beer drinkers who had provided their email addresses to Pintley over the years.

In an email alerting recipients of the transition, Pintley’s Rich DiTieri, Tim Noetzel and Shannon Hicks said Drink Craft Beer shares the “same ideas about beer, community, and our goals of helping people discover great beer in fun, social settings.”

“We’re so happy to have them carry the torch of what we’ve created, bringing together their and our years of hard work and experience in craft beer events to keep delivering on what we set out to do,” they wrote.

The Pintley Company was founded in 2009 as a beer recommendation and check-in app that competed with Untappd, a market-leading mobile app that allows consumers to rate and review the beers they drink.

When Untappd began gaining broader consumer appeal, Pintley pivoted to an events-promotion business model, partnering with bars and breweries on meetups and rare beer tastings.

Wharton said Drink Craft Beer didn’t have any immediate plans to continue pursuing the smaller events as a potential revenue stream, noting that he, along with co-founder Devon Regan, have full-time jobs and run Drink Craft Beer as a side business.

“The biggest issue for us is time,” he said. “Our revenue model is really based off of the festivals. We want to expand what we are doing, improve on what we are already doing and get access to more people.”

Drink Craft Beer began as an enthusiast blog in 2006. In 2012, Wharton and Regan expanded beyond written content and small meetups into large-scale beer and food pairing festivals, which they hope to bring to other cities in the future.