| Beer Barons! |
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With every great adventure comes a grand entrance... well sometimes. Barons Brewing is the stuff of late night bar tales - an unlikely story of two likely lads who followed a passion and turned it into a business on the brink of cracking the largest beer market in the world - one so large they find themselves in the ring with the Americans, Germans, Brits, Bavarians, Mexicans, Brazilians and....well, you get the drift. It's the story of an excellent adventure. But every journey of a million miles begins with a single step, so best we first go back to the beginning... The cracked ballad of Barons Brewing began a full 10 years ago when a bunch of brewers from Sydney and Wollongong started their own brewing festival. This was no mere festival for Beirdoes (aka beer weirdos), but a meeting place for those who really like a drink and crave something unique. It was our very own Oktoberfest and the inaugural event was at the Crows Nest HQ of Richard Adamson in October 1997. These festivals were staged every two years for a decade, and typically gathered 100 or so folks and never less than 20 crazy-keen brewers. It meant a celebration of truly bizarre beers - weird and wonderful elixirs like Watermelon Mead, 12% Triple-Bock, Rye Pale Ale and Dunkel Weizen. But 2003 marked a significant change. The crowd (and their brews) had matured since ‘97 and so the 300-plus people who gathered at Scott Garnett's home in Bondi were treated to 15 kegs in five styles - all brewed by Richard and Scott, the future barons. A wonderfully fresh Hefeweizen, which travelled ‘from grain to brain' in just five days, was a rousing favourite with the crowd. Likewise, "Marianne" - a stunning Ginger beer named in honour of the foxy brunette's pal in Gilligan's Island. Also on show were some early incarnations of the beers that would become Barons Lager and Barons Extra Special Bitter. Beyond the beers presented and the litany of commissions for personally-tuned brews, this was the event where people begged Scott and Richard to get serious about founding a brewery of their own. In May 2004, the boys attended the Australian International Beer Awards in Melbourne. There, meeting the characters in the independent craft beer industry - Tim, the kilt-wielding non-Scot of Five Islands Brewing, Cam and Dave of Mountain Goat, Paul Holgate, Geoff Scharer and so on - they experienced the passion and cameraderie of brewers and were caught in its tractor beam. It was decided then - they'd give it a go.
Building a business...Diary Entry #1: November 2004 - Ground work for new brewery in motion: business plan, staff, funding, recipe development, brands, trademarks, designs, wedding testing etc. Raising the money to start the business saw two separate capital funds approach us offering approximately $1,000,000 for 70% of the company. The quandry: The Lure of Cash at The Cost of Control. This would undermine everything we're about - being independent, providing a choice of beers, going to market OUR way - basically killing the dream from the start. We decline all offers of a buy-out. Waving goodbye to a million never looked so good... Diary Entry #2: Anzac Day, April 2005 - After a couple of games of two-up, we were on the Coogee bowling green, each with a schooner at either end of the green, playing against a Turk for honours of the day - "doesn't get much more Australian than that on Anzac day". After 10 or so beers, several games (and a stoush or two) Richie proffered his dream for a new range of beers, uniquely Australian in that they would include unique bush spices driving the flavour and do so carrying a distinctly Australian name: Black Wattle. And so it was decided. (BTW - we Anzac boys won the day!) Diary Entry #3: July 2005 - Much of the planning for Barons was done at the Roxbury hotel on St Johns Road, Glebe - essentially the default HQ for the newly formed company made up of Scott and Richard with contributions from Jamie, Hamilton and Matt. One night at the Rox the boys were thinking of the name for the business, when Scott boldly declared, "I just wanna be a beer baron!" After a period of silence and a couple of grins, a new era in Australian brewing began.
The Scent of ExportBy late 2005 Barons was born - a Sydney-based, proudly and determinedly independent craft beer company serious about offering flavoursome yet approachable beer in the Australian beer market and having a great time along the way. After all, a great brew isn't just about the destination, it's how you get there! Barons commercially produced its first beer in December 2005 - the Black Wattle Ale. By the first half of 2006, with offices above the Phoenix Hotel in Paddington and a staff of ??? Barons Brewing had grown into a serious craft beer business. Demand for the beers grew, sales exploded and more people joined the team. Everything was happening fast but not everything was rosy. The business sure felt some teething pain in those early days - missed deliveries, stock shortages, supplier issues. Then there was Barons' first sales hire - a wine guy with great grape contacts but little beer experience who simply couldn't make the transition to beer's customers, structures and products. It was a costly but valuable disaster. Although quite young and wholly intent on keeping Australia as the main focus of the business, questions were soon being asked as to why we should limit our ambitions to these shores alone. There were so many beers being imported into Australia. What was to stop us exporting Barons beers overseas?
Our first export deal happened by chance. A former business partner contacted us in late 2005 about an opportunity to export to Ireland. Shipping beer to the Irish seemed too good to be true, but we shipped a couple of containers over in May 2006 and that initial contact with the international beer market ignited our interest and fueled further investigations into what other export opportunities might exist out there. Through the first half of 2006, a dedicated Barons BDM conducted our preliminary assessment of the US.
Night after night, for six months we feverishly dug and cold-called US distributors, while firing off thousands of emails and conducting massive amounts of research. The deeper we drilled the more it felt like we were dealing with more like 50 countries rather than one. The more questions we asked, the more remained unanswered. Worse, new questions arose: Is this the right market for Barons? Are we biting off too much? What are the barriers of entry? Who's the right importer? And the big one: Why has no Aussie craft beer company ever before signed a national deal in the US? Just before we left for the States, a rainbow hit us - Barons' Black Wattle Ale won Best in Class at the 2006 AIBAs, beating over 200 domestic and international beers. A timely award it would be.
The Voyage of DiscoveryScott Garnett (Managing Director) and Sean Neylon (International Business Development) departed Sydney in late-May 2006 on a trip they knew would either confirm or kill Barons' potential export to the US. Diary Entry #1: Dallas, Texas. Exhausted from the flights, we booked into a decent-enough hotel and went straight to the local bar. Beers like Fat Tire, Samuel Adams, Pyramid and Sierra Nevada were chosen. Maybe it was the jet-lag but there were some surprisingly good ones. After dinner, we visited a famous local Pool Bar caled Za Za's, where we were befriended by a famous NFL quarterback, some Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, and several B-grade movie stars - all of them keen to try a drop of Barons. Excitement was high and the reception was exceptional. God bless America! And God save Za Za's Pool Bar! Diary Entry #2: Meetings with some of the biggest beer importers in Texas, we saw warehouses the size of football stadiums (one importer had five of these in this state alone!) The tale of Barons was told to those that would listen and they all loved the famous Aussie accents and warmed to our enthusiasm for exporting our beers. Black Wattle was acclaimed as "truly unique" and "a beer to capture the imagination of Americans". That night we had dinner at the famous Nobu Restaurant in Dallas where, for desert, we were presented with a special menu that included ‘Black Wattle Ice Cream'. We assumed the boys back home were taking the piss, but the chef - one Ross Shonhan - was from Australia and pretty soon we were sharing stories over a beer in true expat Aussie style! Tomorrow, off to Tampa to speak with our biggest potential customer, the Outback Steak House chain of 800 restaurants - a good client for anyone looking for a start in the US. Diary Entry #3: From Tampa we flew to Boston to meet with a major importer with four generations of importing and distribution history. The front-desk foyer certainly showed it - an old wooden spiral staircase ala Gone with the Wind, live birds flying around reception and ornate Civil War-era furniture like Indian statues, horse monuments, carts, and so on. We were both impressed by the wealth and grandeur on show - and a tad intimidated - but the meeting went very well and best of all, they loved the beers. Diary Entry #4: The flight from Boston to New York was one of the same hijacked on 9/11 so tensions were high but New York is New York - an amazing place. At 10am we met the NYC beer importer in what we discovered was an "undesirable" area. We'd asked three taxis to take us there and all three suddenly forgot how to get there from the city! We finally bribed a cabbie and immediatly felt like we were arriving on the set of the Sopranoes. Scott performed like a gangster - all front! - and it worked, particularly when our contact's opening line was: "I got three questions: Where the f*** is Australia? Is New Zealand part of it? And what the f*** is wattle?" Not even walking through the shoot for Beyonce's new film clip today can alleviate our jet-lag! Enough talk, enough travel, enough driving on the right hand side! The US opportunity exists but there's much to be done... The Final Push...Back at home the boys focused on growth in Australia - recruiting the right people (our national sales manager shortened his honeymoon and oversaw distribution orders from Ho Chi Minh City - sorry Jane!), running a showcase at the Australian Hotel on AFL Grand Final Day (the lads, long-time Swans members, forsook tickets to attend the bash, albeit in tuxedos and "blood" scarves), and launching the brand (now bearing the unique logo and pack artistry of Moon Designs) - all while eyeing off that distant opportunity in the US. Being a proudly independent company, Barons recieved enormous support from the indy retail trade and so returned it by focusing on small-time retailers. This in turn delivered fantastic growth in the second half of 2006, greater than any previous expectations. Within six months, we launched Black Wattle on tap for Scott's 35th Birthday, released the Barons Extra Special Bitter, and unveiled the Baronesses at our launch parties (Scott designed the uniform based on his penchant for ‘50s pin-up girls). While all that domestic work was underway, the team keenly pursued the opportunity in the US - product development, importer selection, contract negotiation, the usual stuff. Then the breakthrough. On February 27 we announced to the world that, after much work and diligence, Barons had signed a landmark $30 million deal with the giant United States Beverage which will see 1.3 million cases of the Barons range hitting the best bars and liquor stores across all 50 states of the US, beginning with California, NYC, Florida and Chicago in May 2007. "United States Beverage reviewed the Australian beer market for some time looking for great Australian beers that had export potential," observed Joe Fisch - President of United States Beverage. "The response to Barons beers has been outstanding across the vast US network. By their overwhelming response, we expect that Barons will be the largest Australian premium brand across the United States within a short period of time." "Barons beers perfectly capture the Australian sense of adventure and fun," said John Chappell, senior vice president and marketing director for USB. "U.S drinkers are searching for unique, high-end, flavoursome beers and Barons is right in line with this trend." |
The mission? Start small, grow fast, aim high, taste heaven. Barons' boss Scott Garnett reveals the inside story of how his little brewery conquered the biggest beer market in the world.
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