This weekend marks the 14th anniversary of The Bruery. The Orange County craft brewery will celebrate with a big ticket ($120) event, The Bruery’s 14th Anniversary Invitation Festival, which officially kicks off Saturday with unlimited pours from more than 70 craft breweries, wineries, cideries and meaderies. The host brewery and its IPA-producing sister brand, Offshoot Beer Co., will bring more than 25 exclusive pilot brews to the party.
This is not a one-and-done affair though. Members of The Bruery’s Hoarders and Reserve Society clubs will receive early access to the festival’s featured breweries during a private ticketed event Friday night. The weekend wraps up Sunday with a sold out brunch with chef Chris Tzorin.
The entire weekend is a showcase of The Bruery’s work to bridge its membership bottle clubs with in-person experiences.
“We really want to lean into the experiential piece,” CEO Barry Holmes told Brewbound.
Holmes anticipates a couple thousand people to take part in the weekend’s festivities. The Invitational is part of The Bruery’s strategy of creating experiences for its customers — one that Holmes expects to pick up in the latter part of the year with the return of member-exclusive “Supper Club” events that the company initially started doing in 2019 with local chefs in collaboration with the brewers but paused during the pandemic.
“The members love that stuff. It was fun for us, and I think it kept the brand a little more top of mind,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I found there would be places that I would go before the pandemic — and I still liked them, but I got out of my routine — and you just don’t go back until someone reminds you.”
In an effort to activate its members, The Bruery is planning for Supper Club events to resume in September and October, Holmes said.
“We want to get this to where we can drop these in and do them in a market easily, and so we’ll probably expand that to do it in the Bay Area, do it in LA and probably do a couple in D.C., Philly.”
Holmes sees the annual festival, Supper Clubs and member-only tasting room events as the bridge to The Bruery’s membership business.
To take that to the next level, The Bruery is picking up its pre-COVID plans to open additional locations, starting in Los Angeles. Those plans remain in place but “are on ice,” pending funding, Holmes said. When those locations pick up, the plan is for a “light footprint,” around 2,500 sq. ft., with “a little bit of outdoor space” in an “urban environment where it really hits the demographic” that the company has cultivated since 2008, Holmes outlined.
“By getting that humming again, and then looking at a tasting room model, like I said, light footprint in the markets we can ship beer to, it gives us that 360-degree approach, where we say, ‘The Bruery is in business in this area. You can come visit us and taste our interesting beers or what we have, but then you can either pick your beers or wine up there or you will ship it to you,’” he said. “That’s where the membership and the direct-to-consumer really converge to be something that’s viable.”
Getting those in-person touch points are key for The Bruery following the last two years of pandemic-hampered business. After the company’s e-commerce business “took off in 2020” and helped “mitigate the losses” caused by California’s strict lockdowns that closed the company’s tasting rooms, the company is now feeling “the hangover effect” two years later, Holmes said.
“There was this thinking among DTC brands that COVID accelerated DTC by five, 10 years, and it did to a point,” he explained. “But now you’ve got this dynamic where it’s going to regress to a certain level, and it’s still going to outpace, but the comps that you thought you had in 2020, 2021, those aren’t real. But everyone else is pouring money into DTC advertising, which makes any efforts you put forward more expensive. So that’s been a challenge as well.”
The DTC business has “a lot of swirling variables right now,” including “some price sensitivity” that the company hadn’t seen in a while, Holmes said.
“Someone who was planning on buying three $45 bottles, maybe they’re buying one or two,” he said. “But we are seeing more interest. We look at the direct-to-consumer funnels, how many people visit the website, how many leads or contacts we get, that’s starting to tick back up, whereas we had this big spike through COVID and then that regression back to the mean, and now I feel like it’s starting to grow again.”
To help bolster those efforts, The Bruery has hired James Bruner as head of production and Jordan Narducci as VP of marketing and e-commerce. Bruner, who previously led Creature Comforts’ West Coast efforts, is a “super technical brewer,” Holmes said.
“We’ve had a lot of creativity in the past, but we haven’t had that level of technical brewing prowess,” he added.
Narducci brings experience in direct-to-consumer and branding after running e-commerce for Kelloggs for nearly three years.
On the heels of the anniversary party, The Bruery will open its Reserve Society membership in September. Holmes expects “really low attrition” for the club, which is limited to how much beer is already in process to fill those orders.
“It is definitely limited because most of those beers take a year plus to make, so those quantities are already in process,” Holmes said. “We kind of know within a range how much we should sell, and it’s going to be 5% up, or 5% down.”
The Bruery’s history with beer-wine hybrids gives the company “a license to go into alternative categories like wine, cider, etc.,” some of which may end up as members-only releases, Holmes said.
“When we open up another location or even retrofit our current location, I think we can expand our offerings to at the very least have house wines and things of that sort to really appeal to that consumer,” he added. “But we also may be able to leverage that offering into our direct-to-consumer package as well.”
The Bruery recently auctioned off equipment, including several foeders, as the company exits a leased space for its Terreux sour beer program in Anaheim and brings that production back in-house at its main facility, Holmes explained.
“We’re gonna retrofit a section of our main brewery to do small batch sour beer releases like we’ve always done, but they’re probably not going to be a big part of the business,” he said “Lagers, for example, for us, have started to really grow. IPAs have obviously been [growing], especially hazy IPAs with Offshoot. But when you look at the sour business, I think we were trying to make it more than what it was, and we want it to be a niche, interesting supplement for the membership and maybe some out into distribution.”