Crowdfunding for a Bar

It was last year sometime that we initially said we were going to crowdfund to get us over the hump to start Canning our beers, things changed and we were able to Can our beers without the need for crowdfunding. (I’ll talk a little about cans further down) What we did do last year was shoot a load of video clips from around the brewery so we could put together a Youtube video to promote starting a Crowdfunding effort, we still hope to use some of this and crowdfund to be able to open a local Bar/Micropub/Pub… The bit I’m not looking forward to doing is sitting talking to a camera or recording a voice-over, I mean… WTF do I say?!

I’ll practice my best half stuttered robot fashion delivery…

*Hello I am Adrian from Wishbone Brewery.
*We would really like to start a local Bar but we don’t have any spare cash.
*Will you help us make the leap from just having our monthly brewery events to having a permanent location for our beers?
*What we offer is a few sweeteners for your goodwill and we’ll try our best to make it worth your while.
*We, like you, want whatever we do to be a benefit to us as well as the local community.
*We all want that warm fuzzy glow, preferably from a few good beers 😉

See! Look! I can write it on a Keyboard easy enough, Camera / Filming / Mutter-Mutter / My Arse!

When I have time, I will rekindle the Bar Funding idea and tell you all about it.

Honestly, Cans.
Well the canning day didn’t completely pan out as I have previously blogged about, we really aren’t ‘sales people’ which probably doesn’t help and the best we can do is to talk about our love of beer and what we put into it. We did our best to send little can ‘care-packages’ around to some great pubs…. did we get any reaction to this care-packages you ask? Not really, a couple of places were good enough to maybe follow us back on Twitter or talk to us on an email but for the most part we didn’t even get a thank you, no feedback, no nothing.
We don’t do pushy sales, we don’t want to continually pester people.
Having beer in Can should have opened new doors, it has opened some but no where near enough to feel like its notched us up a gear, I’m a bit sad about this to be honest. Cans should have been a gateway into pubs to sell them Cask and keg beers…. Maybe we should be Pushy annoying sales people!

There is a massive chunk of the current beer / can market that is full-on Uber-Craft, not just Craft, definitely not Real Ale, it seems to sell into some of these places you have to be always producing a Double Mango Milkshake IPA at 8% ABV in a 440-500ml Can that looks like a kids colouring book on steroids… Thats not to say i don’t appreciate good and interesting design, because I do, I’m just trying to make a point. I keep seeing the term FOMO, the Fear Of Missing Out on that new beer, if it not new and 8% you may as well not bother! Weird Craft-Market insular bubble.

Our cans… Our Dassler NZ Helles lager is epic, but a load of places wont or can’t sell canned lagers, there’s no margin in it and people can buy any old industrial piss from a supermarket shelf. Zoikes American Pale is basically BBQ beer, its mega easy drinking and you could happily sup a load of them all afternoon while the smoke of the BBQ fills your garden.

We’ll keep plodding on, doing what we do and doing the best we can, we hope you lot appreciate that we (I) set out to have one foot on each side of the ‘Craft Fence’ there’s not really a reason to ignore our classic styles of beer or do stupid things like renaming a Bitter to be an Amber.

Btw… we have a Kolsch-style beer and our first Sour beer on the brewplan in July 😉