Brewbound Podcast: Burial Beer’s Doug Reiser on the Importance of Immersive Experiences

[00:00:00] Justin Kendall: Heading to CBC? Kick things off the day before at Brewbound's meetup at Love City Brewing in Philly, Sunday, April 19th from 5 to 7 p.m. Connect with beer industry leaders, grab a drink, and catch up with the Brewbound team. It's free to attend and walking distance from the convention center. Head to Brewbound.com slash lovecity.rsvp. And don't forget to catch the Brewbound team at booth 956 during CBC. Next on the Brewbent podcast, how one brewery is creating new experiences. Welcome to the Groupon podcast. I'm Justin Kendall.

[00:00:47] Jessica Infante: I'm Jessica Infante. And I'm Zoe Licata.

[00:00:49] Justin Kendall: And this week we have a featured interview featuring Doug Reiser, the founder and COO For Burial Beer Company and Visual Wines. Jess, you conducted the conversation and I know you're stoked on it.

[00:01:01] Jessica Infante: Yeah, Doug and I had a really great chat. It was really interesting to hear how he and the team at Burial approach creating experiences for customers. They've got a bunch of different locations. All of them are very different and you'll hear all about it, but we touched on their distribution strategy, their DTC strategy, what's working in terms of the 40% growth they recorded last year. A really, really great conversation, great way to get back into having these chats after a month of talking to a baby.

[00:01:32] Justin Kendall: We've thrown you into the fire. But first, what is For Burial name?

[00:01:37] Jessica Infante: Oh, great question. So glad you asked.

[00:01:40] Justin Kendall: And what's this all about?

[00:01:41] Jessica Infante: For Burial, if you don't know, the ethos of their brand really is takes a lot of inspiration from the time that Doug and his wife just spent living in New Orleans, where if you have ever been, you know, on the street in New Orleans and seen like a funeral second line walk by, it's kind of crazy. These are like public funerals that like are basically street parades. And it's like a really I don't want to say fun because it's a funeral, but yeah, there's a lot of fun. There's live music and it's basically everybody joins in to celebrate the life of the deceased. And so they wanted to take that interesting dichotomy of the briefness and finality of life and marry it with the idea of enjoying your time while you're here. So the brand is super introspective, philosophical, like reading their website will make you feel like you're back in that philosophy class you took freshman year of college that you kind of had no business being in. But they also like, they're good at poking fun too. They know that they do take things seriously. So they're able to turn things on its head. And on their website, they've got this fun little like, what's For Burial Beer name? And Doug and I get real into how they name their beers and you'll hear all about it. But it's one of those funny, meme-y, internet-y things that's like the first letter of your first name corresponds with this, the month you were born, the last letter of your last name. So my burial name, if I were Burial Beer, is Precarious Anguish on the Shoulders of the Orphaned Clan. which is a lot. And then I decided to look up what the Burial Beer name of my beautiful, happy, bright, bubbly, smiling, sparkling daughter is. And hers is forlorn, foreboding, pining endlessly for malevolent amnesty.

[00:03:25] Justin Kendall: Wow. Yeah. That's dark. Yeah. Mine is precarious wretchedness in the midst of a crest of discord. That's amazing.

[00:03:35] Doug Reiser: Mine has a lot of alliteration, which I'm very happy with. It is disconcerted desolation on a dispatch of maelstrom. So wow. Say that five times fast.

[00:03:46] Justin Kendall: Well, stay tuned for that. Also stay tuned for Brewbound Live, which is coming back December 11th and 12th in Marina Del Rey, California. We've announced three more speakers. We've got folks from Full Circle Brewing, NIQ, Bump Williams Consulting, joining a speaker roster from Russian River, Deschutes, the NBWA, DraftLine, more to come. You can also do retailer one-to-ones, sign up for those. Whole Foods is our first announced retailer. We've had conversations with others that we should be locking in very soon. So stay tuned for that. But very excited about Prebound Live this year. So how are you doing? Like, it's been a week back, Jess, like you kind of got thrown back into the fire. Like, how are you feeling?

[00:04:34] Jessica Infante: I feel mostly good, slightly overwhelmed. That could be a Burial Beer name. But yeah, I mean, a lot has happened. I don't want to jinx us and say I feel like this week feels more peaceful than last. Try not to say the Q word. But yeah, no, I'm excited to like get back into things and, you know, pick up some threads that I left off before I left and keep on keeping on. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how you guys feel.

[00:04:59] Justin Kendall: We're getting in the swing of it. Yeah, I mean that I think the last week before you're back kind of broke us and we'll get into some of that. But and then we have Zoe, who's become a noted F1 fan.

[00:05:13] Doug Reiser: Yeah, I won't start my rant all over again, but just everyone know it's my entire personality now and I'm one of those obnoxious people.

[00:05:21] Justin Kendall: What's your team?

[00:05:23] Doug Reiser: I am team Ferrari and more specifically team Charles Leclerc.

[00:05:26] Justin Kendall: And he has replaced Harry Styles on your phone.

[00:05:29] Doug Reiser: Yes, let's make this clear on my on my phone wallpaper. Me and Harry Styles are on a bit of a break. He's going through his like he turned 30. He's in a bit of a crisis. He's got some awful facial hair going on. I'm letting him live his life in Italy right now and focused on my Montesquieu man.

[00:05:48] Justin Kendall: Wow. And there's a beer connection to Ferrari, which is Peroni, right? Switch teams.

[00:05:54] Doug Reiser: I believe so. I don't know, but I don't know all the details on that. But there's a lot of non elk beer sponsorships throughout all of F1, which is cool to see everywhere. Like they get a lot of advertising, mainly Peroni and Heineken.

[00:06:11] Justin Kendall: Heineken was all over the Las Vegas race, and I would expect that to be the case later this year, too.

[00:06:18] Doug Reiser: Yeah, they have a race like their Dutch race as well, which they'll be all over.

[00:06:25] Justin Kendall: Let's catch up on maybe some topics, less so on news, but we talked about the excitement behind Anchor Brewing and billionaire Hamdi Ulukaya coming in and rescuing that. That brand and purchasing the property at a steep discount, I think that came in at under $10 million, according to one report out there. But one of the things that has sort of happened in the interim was a few of our friends have reached out and they've said, this is really exciting, how do I get in touch with them? And it kind of got me thinking about, what's it gonna take to get this thing going again? And I would throw it to both of you to ask that at the start, because I have my own idea, but what do you think is the first step in raising the anchor here?

[00:07:22] Jessica Infante: Well, I mean, I think we're probably all in agreement on this. It's that they do really need some dyed-in-the-wool beard people. And I say that because this industry is really complicated and it's also at an extremely complicated time. And I know, you know, I hate when people say, well, this is the way you've always done things. That's not what I'm saying. Like you don't need to bring in a beer person to do things the way they've always been done or the way they should be done, but you're just starting from scratch. So you need a good amount of institutional knowledge to really get things going. And our billionaire friend has admitted that he doesn't know anything about beer. And that's like, I feel like that's probably a good thing. I think that some of the best kinds of people are the ones who know what they don't know. So I think he probably, I obviously don't know him at all, but probably is smart enough to know that he needs an expert. And I think there's a lot of people on the market right now who could really help.

[00:08:24] Justin Kendall: 100% agree. It's a beer person I think is number one on the list that if he doesn't already have that person in mind, he should be figuring out who that person is and how to get them on staff immediately because just shotgunning anchor steam everywhere, you know, on a feel good isn't going to help this brand. I think that a lot of it's going to be owning the home market to start once you do get going. And I mean home market as in Bay Area and doing what it takes. He's got the money to get that beer into the Giants stadium and into the 49ers stadium and doing everything in that local area to sort of build up anchor as the San Francisco brand. And then it's going to take that person with institutional knowledge to help guide that ship.

[00:09:26] Jessica Infante: Yeah. And I think specifically a beer person, not a bell bell person, not a wine person, not a spirits person. You need to be a person.

[00:09:33] Doug Reiser: It seems like he is already in that mindset of focusing on the local first, just based on how much he emphasized the importance of San Francisco and how much he likes San Francisco in his announcements about buying the brewery. I'm not too stressed about them trying to make it this big national brand immediately. We have seen it before. You can't just come and bring money in to craft beer and expect it to eventually work out. It's way more complicated than that. And we've seen other people outside of beer try it and it hasn't worked out. So you need that knowledge. And then I think the next step after that is, okay, now what are you doing about your workforce? And we don't know yet what's going to happen, if it's going to be former employees, if it's going to the entirely new team. We do know that the anchor union put out official statement or release earlier this week and said, hey, we're willing to come back. They said the majority, 30 of the 39 former union workers said they're willing to come back if they were offered a job. And some of those nine that weren't a part of that said, we would still be willing to, we just need to have more concrete idea of what you're going to do with a company first before we say we'll come back. So it seems like they're more than willing to be a part of it. That includes workers who know how to make steam beer, which is not a lot of people. So TBD on if he's going to bring those folks back.

[00:11:06] Justin Kendall: That statement was released on Monday. So that sort of tells you that they haven't been asked yet.

[00:11:12] Doug Reiser: Yeah, they say in that that they have not met with him or with any of his representatives, but that they are willing to talk if he is. He said that he did talk with some former workers. So I don't know who that was or how those two statements can match up, but at least has not been with the full union workforce yet.

[00:11:34] Justin Kendall: Anything else on anchor before we move on?

[00:11:36] Jessica Infante: I mean, the steam beer of it all is interesting because I hadn't even really thought about that until you brought it up, Zoe. But I think it is so important to make sure that this style is able to continue. It's one of few beer styles, I mean, at least before the past like five, six, seven years, one of few beer styles to really be pioneered in the United States. And I think it is really important that it doesn't get lost.

[00:12:00] Justin Kendall: It's going to be really important, too, that those first batches of this beer that hit the market are impeccable, because if you put out bad product at the start, you're already starting from zero. So you're going to be even further back at that point.

[00:12:15] Doug Reiser: Yeah. And consumers are going to be hypercritical of that first release because this is such a beloved brand to them.

[00:12:23] Justin Kendall: All right, let's get into another sort of story of the week. And this one hit my radar because Carlsberg announced a new Brooklyn Brewery ad that is airing only in Europe so far. They're working on whether that ad is going to come to the US. And what really stands out about this ad is it's essentially a short film created by Spike Lee's company, production company, production house, whatever you want to call it. King Chi made the ad and it just really struck me as looking colorful and vibrant and making Brooklyn seem like a coolest place in the world. And I know I am the most naive person in the world. I'm buying into this ad, but it's a young woman who you know, starts her day, ends up at a bodega, buys some Brooklyn Pilsner. Garrett Oliver makes a cameo and is like, that's a great choice, you know, and it's a great use of Garrett in the ad and, you know, a nice nod to the past and the present. And then, you know, she's hanging out with friends, drinking on a stoop, and they're having non-alcoholic special effects, as well as the Pilsner. And then she ends up at a street party, and Spike Lee's there. And, you know, it's just a cool scene. And I wanted to get, you know, sort of a vibe check from you both, because I'm a 46-year-old white man who lives in Iowa. And while this looks cool to me, I realize that it may not speak to others in the same way.

[00:14:02] Jessica Infante: I loved it. I thought it was great. A big, big shout out to the Bodega Cat. There was a Bodega Cat cameo. It was incredible. My husband is a high school teacher, but he also teaches a film class and he teaches Do the Right Thing in his curriculum. So I sent it to him and was like, I would like your thoughts. And he says he appreciates the callback to the original store from Do The Right Thing and Brownstone's Do Pangout cruise. So he also approved. My little brother and his wife lived in Brooklyn for a long time and they were just looking at getting back and renting a place this summer and then recently decided to change their minds and will be purchasing my sister-in-law's mom's house in North Jersey. So This made me a little sad. It was like I almost had people to visit in Brooklyn and now I don't. But such is life. We all grew up, moved to the suburbs eventually.

[00:14:53] Doug Reiser: Well, I have a lot of friends who are currently living their lives in Brooklyn. And every time I've gotten a visit to them, it's been a really good time. And it's kind of the hip spot right now, where all the really fun new bars and restaurants are. And so it felt very familiar to me. I probably have to send it to some of them and see if they think it's too cheesy or not. it felt pretty authentic to what the experience is like. And I enjoyed it. I mean, it's fun. It wasn't doing it didn't have a lot of the like, I think, cliche aspects of beer ads while still speaking to just like the everyday uses or it like scenarios where you're interacting with beer. That makes sense. It's like it wasn't showing people going to some depressing looking tap room or sitting in the back of their trucks outside of a country music festival. No shade to anyone specific, but yeah, it felt new and fresh while also, I mean, it's not like any of the scenarios that happened in there where, I don't know, weird, crazy, only young people do these things. This is what's been happening in Brooklyn Brewery.

[00:16:15] Justin Kendall: It looked like fun. Yeah. It wasn't beating you over the head of this is craft beer or anything like that. The beer was was present and it was in a fun situation and it was being shared and It just really struck me as like this isn't over the top. You know, it's like everything is sort of woven in very nicely. And it makes it makes this look cool. It makes this looks like like a lot of fun. And I feel like this is more of what craft needs or craft brewers need to be doing to sort of push like now, you know, young people drink. They have fun with this product. It's right there, right?

[00:17:06] Jessica Infante: Yeah. You could put this on the air in the US tomorrow and it would be fine. No notes.

[00:17:12] Justin Kendall: The drinking part might be frowned upon, but yeah.

[00:17:16] Jessica Infante: It's funny having a bodega in the street. Wholesalers and retailers love when the actual retail occasion makes its way, you know, into a spot. So I personally love that the cat also made it, as previously noted. But big fan of bodega cats right here.

[00:17:34] Justin Kendall: We had this conversation about wholesalers loving this type of ad after I told you about the Constellation ad with the beer truck delivery driver who got his own like Modelo moment, basically. And he's like slogging kegs and, you know, working his butt off. And it got the loudest reaction. So I, I just wanted to throw that in there. Like it's so true.

[00:17:59] Jessica Infante: Yeah, when I covered the Goldenberg Summit the year before, there were two spots that they showed. One was a bodega and it just showed how hardworking like the owner of the store was. And then one was like an on-premise occasion and the bartender is doing everything. He's like superhuman and is like carrying kegs around. And like both of those got like huge response in the room.

[00:18:18] Doug Reiser: Bodegas are also kind of like trendy right now, I guess you could say, because of things like TikTok, like they're constantly videos. of them making like weird sandwiches and stuff with like grab there's one TikToker who has tons of followers who he just makes really crazy like adds Cheetos to a honey bun and with some cheese like and celebrities going all the time like it's very popular and then like everyone giving JLo crap after she said her bodega order a couple months ago and said the orange drink if you know you know and bodega owners were like we have no idea what you're talking about you're being fake So it's kind of very relevant to pop culture right now.

[00:19:00] Justin Kendall: I realize not everybody can afford Spike Lee's agency or, you know, have Spike Lee make a cameo in their ad or anything like that. But I am saying, you know, this is something that, you know, could cut across, you know, in your own fashions, in your own time and place and audience and speaking to them like that's that's what I feel like this does in a very very nice way and also you know just shows the overall fun factor. Well with that let's move on to some scans and one brand that is maybe hitting a bit of its ceiling, although some of its brands continue to chug on is new Belgium's Voodoo Ranger. And Zoe, you've got the latest scan data report on this. So what's going on in the off premise with Voodoo Ranger?

[00:19:57] Doug Reiser: Yeah, I mean, we kind of knew this might be happening, but a good chunk of Voodoo Ranger brands that are in the top 30 for craft are all recording declines. So if you look like specifically in Grocery, if you want to look there, they have three brands that all have double-digit declines year over year. Juicy Haze, Fruit Force, and the original Voodoo Ranger IPA. Fruit Force is down 34% in dollar sales, 35% in volume. Those are pretty big chunks with the note here that they still have tons of like multiple brands within the top 30. So yes, they were according to clients, but also they are taking up a like, if you count both the new Belgian brands and bells brands, a majority of the brands in top 30 craft across all channels. So take all of this with a grain of salt. Yes, they're according to clients, but they are also still dominating a lot of craft. So a lot of this has to do with them comping a lot of their significant growth over the past couple years. But also some of it could be because of cannibalization. You have multiple brands that kind of speak to the same consumer. A lot of those Voodoo Ranger brands are a little similar. So we're seeing how how long that growth for them can last.

[00:21:24] Justin Kendall: In the case of like Fruit Force, which was their sequel to Juice Force and Juice Force seems to still be chugging along at a good clip. It's I can't remember what what is it overall in off prem so far? Is it three overall in craft?

[00:21:43] Doug Reiser: I don't have the number on here, but I know that it's up 17%. Yeah, I believe it is. It's three overall and second in C stores.

[00:21:52] Justin Kendall: And so with that, that brand is still growing. Although Fruit Force is on the decline, I would point out too that Voodoo Ranger Tropic Force is the only new brand to crack the Top Craft 30 and it is already doing quite well for itself. So I think a lot of those FruitForce dollars are going to TropicForce.

[00:22:17] Doug Reiser: New Belgium has within that top 30, they have, for this is for all Cercana tracked channels, they have FruitForce, which is down, their Hoppy Variety Pack, which is down, Juicy Haze, which is down, Fat Tire, which is down, and Footer Ranger IPA, which is down. But then they also have their Imperial IPA, which is up, Juice Force, which is up, and like you said, Tropic Force, which is a brand new brand that's already in the top 30. And then you also have Bells Too Hearted, which is just slightly down, and you have Bells Seasonal, which is slightly down. So that's a lot of brands to be within like the top 30 highest performing brands of the entire segment.

[00:23:02] Justin Kendall: And we're coming off a rough April-May and heading into the summer selling season. So, you know, after the next three months, once we check in, I wonder where these brands will sit.

[00:23:14] Doug Reiser: We've heard from several companies that April-May was very weird. April specifically was kind of down for a lot of people. I've heard words like rocky and inconsistent. So we'll see once it actually gets into the more busy summer selling season, if it changes. I don't think there's going to be I don't think you're going to suddenly see all these brands like go back into the green. I think they're still going to be they're still going to be dealing with those comps and they're still going to be dealing with how much is a consumer willing to get from all of your brands or are they going to just pick one or two?

[00:23:44] Justin Kendall: I would imagine their variety pack has a better shot at, you know, improving its trends, but maybe we'll see. So anything else in the off premise scans that was jumping out at you at this early juncture?

[00:23:57] Doug Reiser: I mean, it really was a lot of declines within the top 30, specifically for craft. So like, like we said, that possibly could be seasonal, but that was something that stood out. It was like 23 of the top 30 brands were in decline beyond craft and we'll have something up potentially later this week on that. There was some movement. Constellation was number two over Molson Coors for dollar sales in the last four-week period. So that's something of note. Happy Dad is now in the top 25 vendors for both grocery and C-stores. So we talked about our seltzers being down, but there are still some brands, like it or not, that are continuing to grow.

[00:24:45] Jessica Infante: They've also got a hard tea now, right?

[00:24:46] Doug Reiser: Yes. Yeah, they do. They launched a hard tea earlier this year, which they announced at the beer summit. So yeah, they're still having, still increasing the amount of products in that portfolio. So yeah, look out for more from that. There's just a couple little bits and bobs of movement within those top vendors.

[00:25:08] Justin Kendall: Well, with that, I think we should probably get to our featured interview with Doug Reiser For Burial Beer Company.

[00:25:17] Jessica Infante: Our guest today is Doug Reiser, co-founder of Asheville, North Carolina's For Burial Beer Company. We're gonna get into a host of things, but the impetus behind our chat today is the recent opening of the company's Visuals Wine Bar, the rooftop home of a sister brand For Burial. The notion of an extremely popular craft beer brand opening a wine bar certainly makes you go, hmm, but in the context of craft beer in 2024, it of course makes all the sense in the world. Doug, thank you so much for joining. I know how busy you are. How are you doing?

[00:25:46] Burial Beer: I'm resolved. As of yesterday, I would say, it's really cool to get this concept completed. I mean, for all intents and purposes, I'm sure we'll be doing punch list items forever. But this is a three and a half year project that has taken a lot out of me personally for the last year of really trying to put it all together to match the vision with the output. And waking up Monday and being like, wow, I don't have to manage a construction project anymore. Felt really nice for sure.

[00:26:18] Jessica Infante: Congrats. I mean, that's such a huge thing. I know when we do little projects around the house, I get a little out of sorts, like getting the deck painted. I can't imagine what it's like to build a bar on top of your other bar. So congrats.

[00:26:34] Burial Beer: Yeah, we've been in, we've been in nonstop construction projects basically since 2012 when we built the original tap room. I mean, it's, it's been, I bet we've had no more than like a six month break at any given time. Um, so it's, it's nice, uh, for as an ownership team and a leadership team, we decided at the beginning of the year that we were going to take a two year break, which is like incredibly exciting, you know, to be able to like dig a little bit deeper into what you've already done and make sure that it's meeting its intention and vision facilitation. And that's like, you know, sometimes you're just so distracted, but then you're always like on to the next thing, you know, we're focused on the new thing. You just can't, you don't get that opportunity to put your love and brain back into what you're already doing. So I'm really excited to actually be able to do that the next few years.

[00:27:27] Jessica Infante: Well, so we're moving into the next phase of craft beer and it's becoming apparent that it's not enough just to offer great beer. You have to give consumers memorable experiences. And to me, this is something that Beryl excels at. So tell us about the process that you guys use to accomplish this.

[00:27:42] Burial Beer: Yeah, the vision here is immersive experiences. We didn't start BeryL to start a brewery. We didn't want to become a beer manufacturer. I have to explain that very often to people who work here, who want to work here, people in the community, people in the beer industry. I can very briefly say the moment that I wanted to start a brewery was I was visiting a brew pub. in Port Townsend, Washington, and I fell like head over heels for the experience. It was about being in the tap room, you know, which is a vault in so many ways, obviously a burial tap room is you could probably call one of our maybe two of our places like tap rooms. The rest of them are certainly much more diverse concepts. But that that aspect of communal belonging and inclusivity and being able to share your stories with one another over a pint. The beer is supposed to be the inspiring element, a moment of elevation. something to get introspective a little bit about, you know, like, why do I like this? What is it that it reminds me of? Those things are key points to why burial exists. I think it's really important for any founder to go back and say, like, why the hell did I do this? And why am I still doing this? And that has been important for us at many inflection points over our 11 year history. And probably none more so than the last year or two as we really try to get real about getting outside of craft beer. And I think that experientially, the beverage lineup is Remarkably similar, you know, you may see more wine at one place and less beer and more beer at one place and less wine and cocktails and there might be a more extensive non-alcoholic beverage. We might have espresso machines because we're focusing on our coffee, but like those that is served to or that the extent of that is tailored to the experience that we want a customer to have in that place. We don't copy-paste. It's really important to us to never do that, despite how much people adore our original taproom. We just will not do that again. If we did, I think we would have strayed far from purpose and stopped trying to elevate people with new experiences that make them think and interact differently.

[00:30:15] Jessica Infante: I mean, let's run through some of those locations. You've got in South Slope in Asheville, it's your original location. It's a small intimate tap room, but then you've also got Forestry Camp, which is the production facility that also has a few very diverse hospitality spaces. Eulogy is your event venue primarily for live music, right? And then Visual's rooftop wine bar is on top of that. And that's just in one city. Plus, you've got the House of Relics, which is your vintage themed taproom in Charlotte and in Raleigh, the exhibit, which is like an art themed experience.

[00:30:49] Burial Beer: I would say like, like, the most important thing for us is to breathe life into those things that once were and that is At our core, something will never change. You'll never see new construction For Burial. It's just not who we are. The closest thing you can say is that Visuals is all new construction. It was on a rooftop, so it had to be, to some extent, new construction. But we really like to utilize buildings that have a little bit of character to themselves, Abandoned often, I mean the place, the Forestry Camp was out of service for 20 some years. It was completely abandoned by the federal government and then a church that tried to revitalize it and kind of just used it for storage. You know, similar with even Transfer Hall in Raleigh, which is the one venue that we do not own personally. was an old carriage house, and in Charlotte was a building that we were able to purchase that was forever an incredibly cool vintage boutique and fashion shop. So, you know, we try to, like, tell those stories going forward with each one of these concepts. That's really, really important to us. You don't try to fight it. You don't try to, like, fake cool. I think that's really important, or people or otherwise you're just kind of like any other big box retap room. So that's tried. That is absolutely been the most differentiating like concept for us with each one of these places. And with eulogy visuals, this was an old, basically an antique hall. I mean, it was built mid century, mid 20th century as basically like an antique storage in the basement, show room on the main floor. So we put the music hall on the main floor. That was where the show was before. That's where the show goes on today. And put storage in the basement. Put a brewery on the main floor as well. So we try to go with what the buildings give us. And most of the time, when we come up with a concept, it's a marriage of what's there and what we believe can be.

[00:32:52] Jessica Infante: Very cool. Well, let's dig into visuals for a little bit. It's a wine brand launched in 2018, which is well before most craft brewers were even thinking of diversifying their portfolios. Where were you expecting the brand to go back then?

[00:33:05] Burial Beer: I often kind of forget about the fact that when we did that, there was really nobody else doing it, certainly in craft beer, obviously. It was a personal path, I would say, for myself. I was fascinated with wine. Wine actually was my gateway to craft beer. When we moved out to Seattle in 2006, My wife and I moved there from New Orleans. In New Orleans, you drink cocktails and crappy beer. That's just like the life of New Orleans, at least at the time we lived there. So when we got to Seattle, we're like, what is all this agriculture? And it was fascinating. In the neighborhood that we lived in, there was a couple of wine bars. We'd go in and we drank Columbia Valley wine. And that drove us down to drove us into wanting to visit the vineyards and learn more about the homesteads and the people that manage these vineyards and make wine. And through those trips in the eastern Washington, we started to see the hop fields and smell the hop fields. Our partner, Tim Gormley, is the first person that really turned me on to beer in a way that I got so enamored that I realized that there was no way I was going to not explore this deeper. He bought me a pint of Pliny the Elder, actually, weirdly enough. It's such a cliché answer, and that was the beer at Naked City Taphouse in Seattle. Weeks later, we went to the Yakima Fresh Hop Festival, went back out and saw the fields. The Fresh Hop Festival is the reason that I fell in love with beer and why we have a brewery today. I would say that we always talk about like your foray into beer is like a circle. Like, you know, you start with these crappy lagers, get into hops and you try big stouts and you try the wild stuff and you inevitably come back around to what you were. I feel the same way about wine. Wine was my first love with agricultural products in general. And I couldn't get over seeing the field and I love beer. I always will, you know. water, yeast, grain, and hops being the four ingredients. I love those things and they're manipulable and that makes it wonderfully possible to start a brewery in Asheville, North Carolina with materials from all around the place. But the place and the people and the farm and the beauty in making a beverage from one ingredient You can consider the water table and the sun, the weather, the soil, like all those elements as well. But it was something I think that as you go through that full circle and you get back to the most simple beers being the ones you're most enamored with, I had that same journey. As I got back, they put me square back into wine back then in 2017. And so we set out on trying to find a partner that could source grapes for us and teach us how to make wine. And we found that in Chad Stock, who was the winemaker at Omero and Minimus. And he had another label named Origin out in McMinnville, Oregon area. And Chad was incredibly, it's amazing. Everybody we've met in wine has been so open arms to us. Like, they're so excited. Like, wow, you want to, beer people want to get into wine? We're like, yeah, of course. Like the, we are collaborators by nature in our industry. It is something that we do all the time as a matter of camaraderie, connectivity, elevation, knowledge. And it's not as traditional in wine. And as we brought that to Chad and we said, let's make a beer together, let's make a wine together. The first season was all about learning about harvest and what is possible for us. So I remember we picked the grapes, we got on the truck, we brought them all the way back to Asheville. We made a wine, we drank some of that wine out of the tank. And then we aged it in barrels so we could turn it into a vermouth because we wanted to go through the entire process of making a naturally fermented wine, a refined wine, and then a fortified wine. And that was what that year was about. It was about probably absorbing a decade of winemaking over one harvest. And we were able to do that through being such open connectors with Chad and then other people in the industry. And inevitably, when we launched the brand, we had transitioned down to California. We had met Evan Lewandowski and his Ruth Lewandowski brand. I remember I drank one of his wines. I looked up his brand. I was like, who is this Ruth Lewandowski lady? And it's a guy. And he named his brand after the Book of Ruth. And his story is so much about the beauty of life and death and the cycle. And it's so attuned to the burial narrative. And I just reached out cold. And we became fast friends. Evan made it possible for us to source grapes selectively to get into vineyards that we probably would never have got into ourselves. And inevitably, Evan took over making wine for us during COVID, essentially, as we were able to launch our first full portfolio of wines in 2020.

[00:37:57] Jessica Infante: That's amazing. I am going to totally out myself here, but I don't know where I thought vermouth came from, but that is not what I was expecting.

[00:38:04] Burial Beer: Yeah, it's a fortified wine. That's it. A lot of vermouth is made from really amazing wine. I mean, a lot of big box vermouth is made from worse wine. There are some really cool American and French examples that are made from wine of the region, wherever the vermouth is from. So it might be Gamay, it might be Pinot, it might be Chardonnay, depending on where it's from. But yeah, it's fortified with brandy made from that wine. So you grow the wine, you make the wine. You then distill that wine into brandy and you inject that brandy back into that wine to bring the alcohol up to a sterilized state. And then you can add your sugar and age the roots, herbs, fruit skins, whatever you're aging on it to gain all those flavors.

[00:38:48] Jessica Infante: So how much overlap is there between visuals drinkers and burial drinkers? Do people interact with both portfolios or are they distinct?

[00:38:56] Burial Beer: That's a great question. I mean, the dream is to create a very natural overlap. And Tim and I, when we started talking about this program, the types of wines we wanted to make, initially, it was the wine that we wanted to make, right? And then this is like every brewer story. You make the beers you want to make. And then you're like, well, maybe we should make things customers want that are marketable. So we started with avant-garde Italian grapes. And then we kind of moved into more everyday varietals from French varietals. And then inevitably started thinking in 2022 that our goal really should be to look at our customer base that we already reach and to try to elevate those people into wine. Not like a lot of people get into new alternative beverages because they're trying to reach a whole new audience. Like, of course, that is an ancillary benefit to doing it is that you can accommodate more people. But for us, it was about elevating our existing customer base. We wanted to turn craft beer drinkers into wine drinkers. And so we started to focus on varietals that we thought could speak to a lot of the points of our program. At Burial, we have four corners. We make very classic-inspired, Americanized lagers. We make hoppy ales. We make big, dark, opulent beers. And we make wild and sour beers. And those are our four corners. As we looked at wine, we really focused on Sauvignon Blanc and Muscat as an opportunity to make kind of like the IPA of wine. We grow Sauvignon Blanc in two different places. We get Muscat from one of those vineyards, and we use the minimal amount. You can actually use less than 10% of anything else blended into a single varietal. It's still called a single varietal. So our Sauvignon Blanc is actually about 90, I think this year it's about 94% Sauvignon Blanc, 6% Muscat. Scott is there to add some of that perfumey tropical fruit aspects and bring our Sauvignon Blanc closer to what you get in Friuli, which is the northeast corner of Italy, the Slovenian border. Those aromatic Sauvignon Blancs are my favorite. They're not as intensely tropical fruit like New Zealand. They're not as dry and mineral as Sancerre in France. They're somewhere in between. And that's what we thought would be like a natural evolution for the beer drinker or somebody that drank hoppy beer to take on wine. And so we make a direct press version. And then as a hallmark to our wild and sour, we also do a version where we age that Sauvignon Blanc on its skin in Oregon made amphora clay pots for an extra year. And then we release that orange wine, you know, slightly oxidized, slightly funkier, more acidic, kind of crunchy, high acid, orange wine in the fall. That wine is kind of like counterpoint. Same fruit, just handled different. It's no different than making a hoppy ale and a hoppy brett beer, a hoppy wild ale. I can't remember the dry hop sour that New Belgium always made that I used to love back in the day. But it's like, you know, like that was kind of like the goal was like, how do we, how do we tell the story of the agriculture and then like illuminate the process and how important it is to making different types of wine. And so I think IPA drinkers enjoy both of those, but certainly IPA drinkers enjoy our direct press and sour and wild drinkers and Saison drinkers love that, that skin contact and 4-H version.

[00:42:35] Jessica Infante: I feel like you're just telling me about myself because I was never a wine person. Like I have always, always, always, always been a beer drinker. And I don't know what happened to me in the past two years, year, maybe, I don't know. Super into Sauvignon Blanc. So all of this tracks and makes a lot of sense. So thank you.

[00:42:55] Burial Beer: Good, yeah. I'm glad. Yeah, I mean, there are opportunities with red as well. We make a nouveau specifically because we want to do that kind of like dark red fruit, more acid driven, low tannin wines that certainly speak to both like the berry driven hoppy ales or the red and dark sour ales. We do make Nebbiolo, which I think is the stout of wine. It's leathery, dark cherry skins. It's got a little bit of tobacco to it. It's got tannin, you know, back end bitterness. And so we do try to focus Syrah and Nabila being kind of like our stout wines, I would call them, one being more of a dessert wine and more being just like the traditional, like punchy, Russian imperial stout kind of wine. And I mean, those are, those are, things that we probably don't point out too much because we want people to naturally fall in love with these things and don't, I don't want them to feel like tricked, you know, into like, Oh, they were trying to like, you know, you don't want to make it a goofy and try to line them up and say like, this is the, this is the, you know, the wine version of these beers, but certainly they're inspired by that type of drinking experience.

[00:44:07] Jessica Infante: Nebbiolo, another one of the few wines that I know and know that I like. So this is basically just the Jess and Fante self-discovery hour. Getting back to the visuals rooftop art eulogy, did you have a home for visuals in the plan or was this something that just kind of presented itself?

[00:44:25] Burial Beer: It was a dream for sure. I would say that when Jess and myself travel, we spend the bulk of our food and bev visits in wine bars. We visit wineries as well. I want to see a vineyard anywhere I go that has vineyards. But, you know, I tend to get back to the more social atmosphere of a wine bar as being kind of like where I'm going to spend most of my day on a travel. So I'd say like probably back in 20... 2020, when we launched the wine label, it was like the moment we have an opportunity to find a space for visuals, we're going to do it. And we bought this building. I'm in the Eulogy Visuals building right now. We bought this building in February 2021 during a flurry of purchases. We bought this building and the Charlotte building weeks apart at the beginning of 2021. with the goal of this Buxton building being right beside our original taproom, not being an extension of that taproom. You heard all that talk about intention. That taproom is beautiful for many really goofy reasons and we don't want to mess that. I would never want to just like adulterate anybody's experience with that place. So our opportunity was to extend people's expectations of elevation by bringing them our music world, our coffee world, our wine world over here so that theoretically you may never need to leave burial downtown in a given day and you can have a multitude of experiences. So when we bought the building and we realized the roof was buildable, that was the first idea we had was this needs to be visuals home.

[00:46:16] Jessica Infante: So let's focus For Burial for a little bit. Your volume grew 40% last year, which is an enormous anomaly compared to the rest of the industry. What's driving that?

[00:46:27] Burial Beer: Well, we were already kind of small. Going from 10,000-ish to 14,000-ish is not a ton. I mean, I would say that it was twofold. I actually was congratulating, writing a congratulatory post to our strategy leadership team this morning in anticipation for our get together tomorrow that we made the right decision on Disho at the right time last year. I mean, we literally, the craft downturn as we saw it on the retail side, started about this time last year. We first noticed, starting to see a year-over-year slide in Raleigh in the spring, and then in Charlotte right now, and then in Asheville probably by the end of July. It was weird how it started in the metros and then got out to Asheville. Asheville is a tourism economy. We don't have a massive amount of residential economy. We don't have a business economy almost at all, office, nine to five kind of business. And so I think that that downturn that we noticed that took a lot of effort to kind of sustain, man, we just kind of got ahead of it organically by saying we got tired of self-distro and realized that in order to support our retail base, we had to have more beer wholesale. That's a weird tactic. And I think if most brewers think through it, they would understand that You know, I liken it to like high fashion, like you put, you know, like Gucci has a, I don't want to liken us to Gucci. I'm going to yell that for this later, but in the fashion industry, they, they make things that are gateway products. And we've had that approach with wholesale for a very long time. We put our loggers and our hoppy ales. And seasonally, we might put a couple Porter's Stouts out there. But our high-end stuff, our double IPAs, our triple IPAs, our wild and sour, our imperial stouts, our barrel-aged program, all that stuff is retail only. We did start with the hope that we would be a retail-focused company, and we still are. We still do about 75% of our revenue as a business in our retail spaces. But last spring, it became very evident that if we were going to grow as a brand, we had to ensure that people could access our brand in limited products in the wider Carolina market. So at that period of time, we finally looked for a distro partner. We had done self-distro. until through the end of April of 2023, and realized that expanding this on our own was not smart. Getting out to the coast was just a lot to put people in trucks, burial trucks, have to drive five and a half hours out there and do overnights when you have people already built logistics networks. Also, we are right at the corner in Asheville of Tennessee and North Carolina. And To really be an Asheville brewery, I think, in my opinion, you have to serve eastern Tennessee and northern North Carolina for sure. And so we had made the decision at that point that our goal was, let's make sure we can draw a two-hour circle around Asheville. And people can go to high-end grocery stores and beer stores and get and access some of our core products and other gateway products as a means of driving brand notoriety and availability and pushing them to our tap rooms so that they can experience our real intention. Because we're not beer manufacturers. It isn't our goal to make, if we were, we'd be making 100,000 barrels by now and we'd be distributing all over the eastern seaboard. It's just not. It wasn't our goal. Our goal was to be experiential. And in order to be experiential, you have to put yourself out there a little bit and make yourself available where people just don't learn about your story. And so that was our goal. And we did that. Just over a year ago now, and that is a big reason that we had already kind of stepped up production as we were bringing on more retail. And so that growth from 10,000 to 14,000-ish in that period of time, and we've grown even more since, was mostly aimed at ensuring we had a couple thousand more barrels for retail and a couple thousand more barrels for distro so we could go into North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee.

[00:50:54] Jessica Infante: I feel like taking a decade old beloved brand with established roots in a community and entering distro is probably very exciting for the wholesalers. So what was your selection process like? Do you have one statewide distributor? Are you in different houses? Was this like a bachelor rose ceremony? Because that's kind of what I'm picturing, but how did that go?

[00:51:16] Burial Beer: Back in 2000, I think it was 17 or 18, when we spun up Forestry Camp and we went from being a 1,500 barrel brewery to a 6,000 barrel brewery or whatever it was overnight, we did the whole Distributors host us and show us why they're the best. And it went terribly. We didn't sign with anybody. Through that, we kept our North Carolina rights. We signed with a distributor in North Carolina. We went into North Carolina. And our much more control-focused brand at the time, where we thought we only wanted to be in the most high end of stores, and we didn't want to be in anything chain, We wanted to stay out of grocery. We made it a week in North Carolina and we bailed because we were held, we were threatened by a major chain retailer who threatened to sue us for not allowing them to buy our product. We said, well, that's not who we are. We have limited product. We want it to be in the best stores. We don't want big box stores to be able to buy up all the inventory. I mean, we had some good intention, but a lot of it was control focused. And I think that we've grown immensely as a brand and as a company and as leaders over the last six, seven years since that moment. And last year, we were sitting down and we said, hey, it's time to expand. We went right. I didn't, I didn't. I was like, I've already done this. I've already done this. I know who it is. I know who espoused our values seven years ago, and they still espouse our values. And that was Advantage Distributing. And they were in North Carolina and North Carolina and Tennessee. So it couldn't have been a better marriage, because we didn't want to touch any states outside of that. We've periodically sent beer to some other places, but we really wanted to hone in and focus there. And their business plan could not be more in line with who we are. their vision focused, their value focused. They cling tightly to those things. They make sound business decisions. The people who work there have worked there basically since the beginning. They have very low turnover. They have people who are passionate about our brand. It was easy. They're amazing wine distributors. And so that was another piece where you're like, well, they're in all the good restaurants in all these states because they have the wine portfolio. And so we didn't know if we were going to expand wine right away. We do everything slow. We're just not, like we're low and slow people. We just always have been. We don't want to take too much risk. We just like, we like growing organically. And so wine is, you know, we made a little bit of wine for our tap rooms and we're making more because we have its own retail concept and we'll make more this year and probably go into some high-end restaurants. in bottle shops, but there was no discussion internally, like not at all. Everybody was like, yeah, they're the partner. And Henry, their owner and founder, made it really easy for us to make that transition and we're really proud of and very happy with that relationship.

[00:54:30] Jessica Infante: So one thing I did notice in prepping for our chat is DTC seems pretty big for you guys. How important is that to your business?

[00:54:38] Burial Beer: I mean, it is our business. I mean, I would say that, you know, wholesale is a means of marketing. Like it's a means of connection. I'll just get that out of the way. Right. That's about a quarter of our sales. I hope, I think it'll grow at about that same rate. Like that's our goal. Our goal is it'll do more wholesale. We're going to make more beer and we'll do more wholesale, but I expect retail to kind of grow with it. And it is a means of maintaining connectivity with the beer retail industry and the customer base that we have that just can't make it to the tap room every day, obviously, or doesn't want to, because we all don't want to spend every day in a beer tap room. We like going to eat at world restaurants and going to a cool wine bar and going to a cocktail lounge. We want to make sure that we can connect with other people's visions as well. That's what Wholesale is for. We would cease to exist if we cease to grow in retail. We are turning on two concepts, which means that we grew from four to two or four to six. So that's a 50% growth of concepts right now. And so we'll take this, this, this period, um, to, to refine those and to learn those. I mean, it's not easy to go. These aren't tap, these aren't craft beer tap rooms, you know, building a winery wine bar. cocktail lounge and a nightclub, basically. We refer to eulogies as a nightclub, and that's what it is. It's completely different programming, completely different customer experience, and that takes learning. You can't just go into that and be incredibly successful with that overnight, so it'll take time. That is why we keep waking up and doing this, is because we continue to be stimulated by the opportunity to connect with all types of customers in different ways. If we didn't do that, I wouldn't do it. There's no way we would bring in senior leadership here that said, we have a huge wholesale opportunity and we need to strike, and that needs to be where all of our growth goes for the next three years. We'd rather shut it down. It's just not for the three of us. The three of us built this thing ourselves. We never took on investors. We didn't take on outside management that told us what to do. We now have employees who give us really good advice, and we listen incredibly well. But they're here because they believe in our vision, and they espouse our values. and they want to do the same. They have the same idea for the future of Ariel that we do.

[00:57:36] Jessica Infante: So e-commerce. What's that like? I'm sure it gives you a lot of data, it tells you a lot about your consumers, but is that mostly people who have visited you from other places and want to have Burial Beer at home? How does that relationship work?

[00:57:51] Burial Beer: I just realized you asked me DTC and you probably meant e-commerce. Thank you. I did.

[00:57:55] Jessica Infante: Sorry, I should have said e-commerce.

[00:57:56] Burial Beer: Thank you for adjusting the question so that my thick head can let it through. We are alive and got to the point, like we are at where we are today because of DTC during COVID. I will tell anyone that that saved our ability to grow during a period of time where a lot of people were hurting in this industry or felt totally stalled out. We put, you know, one of the first online shops, up there like overnight, like we were there like April 1st. We were very fortunate to be friends with the team behind CraftBeak who started this first kind of online beer stores and they've since merged with Arrive and we now build our own shop in Spotify or Shopify. I do that all the time. And that DTC, it's our seventh taproom. We talk about this all the time. It's our seventh location. It's a portal. It's a virtual portal into the burial world. It's like build your For Burial and visuals experience at home. Wherever you are, you can be up in Massachusetts now and get a full array of all the taproom experiential products. The merch, every once in a while, you'll get a handwritten note from our team here. You'll get cool little freebies. We try our best to make sure that people feel like they had a high five from the taproom when they get that box. And I think that's the most crucial aspect of it. It was the growth. that we needed in 2020 and 2021. It enabled us to find our flow of making products and releasing products. And it fell off a cliff in 2022. When FedEx kind of pulled the plug on some of our shipping regions, that they were kind of like test casing with us. And they were like, hey, we're not doing beer shipping anymore. They pulled that plug like overnight and we had to go back to UPS and that was a limited network. And the tap rooms were back and thriving. And so you had this weird period where it was like all DTC and on, you know, off premise was pretty much everything and the on premise was low. And then the on-premise grew a ton and people didn't really want to buy for home because everybody was excited to get back outside. So we kind of lost focus on it, I'd say, for a little while. And it took until last fall for us to build our own new shop. And we've seen growth again year over year for the first time in years. That's been really wonderful to see. I think that our DTC does probably what some taprooms do in annual business and that's amazing. That's why we say it's our seventh retail realm. And it's something I think everybody takes a lot of pride in, trying to create a cool experience for everybody that buys that stuff at home. And we've learned a lot from companies that are DTC companies. There are companies like that's their entire vision. They make a product somewhere and they ship it to people's homes and that's it. They don't have retail stores and they don't distribute. That's what they do. And those cool companies like Gaia was the non-alcoholic aperitif company. I don't know if you've ever seen it. But their packages are amazing. Their boxes are so intentional and the little gifts that they give you and the recipes. It's just amazing what some of those companies do to keep customers coming back and for them to feel elevated. We hope, as part of our two-year break from building brick-and-mortar tap rooms, to put a lot more love into that DTC experience.

[01:02:01] Jessica Infante: Well, one more before I let you go, because I know we're over time and you moved like heaven and earth to make this conversation happen, which I super appreciate. But something I noticed was you guys on your website, you do an excellent job of laying out the Brandt's philosophy. And that takes its roots in the dichotomy of New Orleans funeral culture, which is very much the celebration and the end of life. And I'm so sorry for this. And it all can feel very grave. For lack of a better word, but you do a good job at poking fun to like your beer namer. I had way too much fun playing around with this, figuring out what my burial name would be and what my daughters would be. And I am precarious anguish on the shoulders of the orphaned clan.

[01:02:42] Burial Beer: Yeah, that's awesome.

[01:02:43] Jessica Infante: Yeah. And Cora, my tiny beautiful little baby is forlorn, forlorn, foreboding, pining endlessly for malevolent amnesty.

[01:02:55] Burial Beer: Those are a lot of my favorite words. I have to, I have to go on untapped all the time and see if I've used the word like, because I have a rule here. When you write a name, When you write a name, it has to be natural, meaning you did not piece it together, ever. It's something you said. And so you said, or you felt, or you expressed, or you can be inspired in the moment and say it, but do not thesaurus and construct a Burial Beer name together, or it's out. I have that rule with our brewery team. The only people that have burial that name beers anymore are some of the brewers, and they have opportunities to do that through collaborations or their own projects. And they know that the burial voice can be anyone. It's highly introspective. It's curious. It's not necessarily macabre, but it knows no boundaries. And I think that that's the most beautiful thing about what we do is that we ask people to think deeper beyond what might be what's the word, like a PR appropriate term or whatever, you know, what might be, um, appropriate for marketing terms, you know, like, don't think about marketing, think about yourself and like what your experience on this planet is like. And so I keep a journal and every day I have a conversation with my sons and every day there's something I say to them because they, they're either frustrating me or I'm trying to be really deep, you know, like, in tune with their emotions, or sometimes you're just explaining something simple to them. Like I remember I, my, my son's goldfish died or fighting fish died in a beta. And I named it, I named a beer after something I said to him. I said, Axel, today's the day you have to learn about the finite spectrum of existence. And it was the day I had to kind of teach him that like, we're all here for a temporary period of time. And it was like, uh, that happens to me once a day, probably that I write something that is, is deep and impactful and it sounds burial. And so you write it in the notebook and you use it the next time you do the production calendar. But the most important thing to us here at burial and all three of us, you know, the three of us have been through life through the churning, the gnawing jaws of urgency and prioritization and, validation issues and man, you know, it's hard to be a human and we are responsible for not only those two kids at home, but 120 some people who work here at burial and thousands of people that are in this community who are struggling with mental health or physical health or financial problems or socioeconomic problems that they don't get assistance for. And so, you know, to try to be attuned to that. And we do that through our charitable programs, of course. But like, we want people to feel that when they pick up a Burial Beer, that it might actually resonate with them and shit they're going through. Because I think it's really important. And beer doesn't have to be a marketing gimmick ever. It can relate. And I think that that's really important for us, for the rest of our existence, that we will always relate and we will always project the value of our curiosity forward as a brand.

[01:06:34] Jessica Infante: I think that's a perfect place to leave it. Doug, thank you so much for joining me for this chat. And that is our show for this week. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to the whole Brewbound BevNET audio visual team that makes all of this possible. And always to Justin and Zoe for being some of the best co-hosts there are. And hopefully we will see you next week.