A week after the 2022 edition of WWE’s WrestleMania, El Segundo Brewing Company is still feeling the aftershocks of “Stone Cold” Steve Austin crushing Broken Skull American Lagers throughout his first wrestling match in 19 years with a streaming audience in the millions watching.
Across WrestleMania’s two nights at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, Austin opened 35 Broken Skull Lagers — or “Steveweisers” — according to a conservative estimate from BT Sport.
El Segundo owner Rob Croxall told Brewbound that Austin received 10 cases of Broken Skull Lager for WrestleMania on Saturday and then asked for more on Sunday.
“There’s at least 240 beers that he got through somehow on Saturday,” Croxall said.
For his part, Austin said the volume of beers he went through during WrestleMania was “not to gratuitously advertise them but because I genuinely had cottonmouth,” following such a long absence from wrestling.
Throughout his brawl with antagonist Kevin Owens, Austin asked for and received several of his namesake beers, soaking himself, his opponent and the ring.
Austin emerged victorious, leading to his signature celebration: Standing on the ring ropes and smashing beers together creating a foamy waterfall of beer. Throughout the whole endeavor, a Broken Skull Lager can was strategically filmed on the ring apron for the millions watching live on streaming service Peacock to see. Austin celebrated again with more Broken Skull lagers on Night Two, after giving his trademark Stone Cold Stunner to WWE head Vince McMahon and podcaster and former athlete Pat McAfee.
All told, the two nights likely will go down as one of the biggest earned media events for a craft beer. In the wake of the debauchery, El Segundo faces an outsized demand despite the company shipping 10,000 cases of lager (16 oz. 4-packs) and another 10,000 in process, El Segundo chief vision officer Tom Kelley shared with Brewbound. He added that emails continue to flood in every 20 minutes from wholesalers and customers wanting to know how they can get Broken Skull.
“A tidal wave of demand is the only way to state it,” he said. “Nationally televising a beer of this scale is crazy.”
El Segundo knew it would struggle to meet that tsunami of demand, Croxall added. But that’s the way it’s always been, dating back seven years to the start of the brewery’s partnership with Austin.
Croxall recalled telling Austin that if he really wanted to leverage his brand and cash in, he should go with a regional brewery. Austin wouldn’t have it.
“Even though we’re pushing as hard as we can, he has never once asked for more production or to push harder or anything like that,” Croxall said. “He’s just an amazing partner.”
According to Kelley, El Segundo hasn’t seen anything comparable since Austin drank Broken Skull IPA during the Monday Night Raw “Reunion” show in 2019. At the time, El Segundo didn’t package Broken Skull in cans, but Austin called asking for 10 cases and the brewery delivered.
“We hand canned it because we didn’t have a canning line, and he got on Raw Reunion and that whole madness happened,” Kelley said. “Overnight the demand for Broken Skull was 1000s of percent growth. It went from ‘Oh, we make one 30-barrel a month’ to brewing as much as we possibly can and looking for contracting partners because we can’t possibly make enough.”
In March 2020, El Segundo began offering Broken Skull IPA in 20 states — just as the pandemic was shutting down the U.S.
“Despite all the challenges of the pandemic, it did very well,” Kelley said. “And now we’re at a precipice of, it’s happened again, but we’re actually prepared. American Lager is in tanks everywhere. We’ve got it in up to 28 states.”
The reality for El Segundo — which contract brews the Broken Skull beers with Figueroa Mountain in California and New Realm in Virginia — is that the company will likely never meet all of the demand for Broken Skull, Croxall said. The beers won’t be sold in small town Walmarts, more likely appearing in more craft-centric accounts through wholesalers such as the Sheehan network on the East Coast and Flood Distributing in Texas. American Lager, which launched fittingly on March 16 (Austin 3:16 Day), is available in 28 states, including expansion markets of Chicago (via Grant Distributing) and Florida (through Cavalier).
“There’s a lot of challenges to getting it into the market in the way people expect, but the demand is insane, and we’ll keep racing after it,” Kelley said.
Croxall added that direct-to-consumer shipping of beer and merch is also “way up right now.” The company is also working with CraftShack on direct-shipping as well.
El Segundo tried to get the beer placed in national accounts for WrestleMania, including the Walmart next to AT&T Stadium, but ultimately that didn’t come to fruition, Kelley said.
“We just don’t have those sort of relationships, to some degree,” he added. “We’ve fostered some and there are some great successes. HEB placed us in 135 of their stores in Texas, which is a huge win for us. For Flood Distribution, who’s with us in Texas, it’s the largest brand they’ve ever gotten with HEB, which is a huge thing, especially considering we’re not even a local brand in Texas.”
El Segundo is pushing for Broken Skull American Lager (4.8% ABV, featuring Contessa hops) to be included in the fall and spring resets.
Austin called the release of Broken Skull American Lager a proud moment. He recalled Croxall suggesting doing a lager and he gave his signature retort: “Hell yeah.”
“It was just meeting people’s demands,” he said.
Lager was a logical next step for Austin, who has long involved lagers from the country’s largest brewers in the ring. In the 1990s, he celebrated victories over rivals The Rock, The Undertaker, Mankind, and Triple H with macro lagers. Once, he drove a DeCrescente Distributing Coors Light-wrapped beer truck to the ring before hosing down The Rock and Vince and Shane McMahon in the build up to WrestleMania 15.
“I’ve drank everybody’s beers in the past, and I’ve been drinking beer my whole life, and I don’t speak technical beer language, but we’ve given those other brands a little bit of a rub by using their beers,” Austin added. “So to go out there and drink our own beer was very satisfying.”
Croxall argues either of the Broken Skull beers can stand on their own. But Austin’s “buy in” and his commitment to helping promote the beers help take them to another level, Croxall said.
“All these little pieces together make this relationship so genuine,” he said. “It makes it a more genuine product than just something with a celebrity slapping their brand on.”
The Broken Skull beers focus more on what Austin likes in a beer than “what’s going to move in the market,” Croxall added. “It is a very personal thing for him.
“He’s not busting our balls for more sales,” Croxall said. “We can do what we can do and he totally gets it.”
El Segundo’s leaders and Austin know that the lager won’t be able to compete on price with macro lagers, especially in the existing inflationary environment.
“We’re never going to compete on the level of a macro lager or even a big regional lager,” Croxall said. “We’re going to be a buck or two more. We just are.”
Austin calls it a “passion project.”
Even if WrestleMania 38 is Austin’s final hoorah as a wrestler — never say never — it likely won’t be the last time Austin shows up on WWE’s biggest shows. WrestleMania 39 in 2023 will take place at So-Fi Stadium, right in El Segundo’s backyard.
“Hopefully next year at WrestleMania we can get the beer in the stadium,” Kelley said
For more on the Broken Skull beers, look for the Brewbound Podcast next week, featuring “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Rob Croxall and Tom Kelley.