The D2Z Podcast

Identifying and Building a Business Around a Personal Need with Joe Chura - 127

• Brandon Amoroso • Episode 127

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In this episode of The D2Z Podcast, host Brandon Amoroso speaks with Joe Chura, founder and CEO of Go Brewing, about his journey from the automotive industry to the world of non-alcoholic beer. Joe shares insights on building a strong team, the importance of product quality, and the strategies behind their e-commerce and retail growth. He discusses the challenges and opportunities of selling on platforms like Amazon, the decision-making process for tech solutions, and innovative ways to crowdsource leads for distribution. Joe also highlights how AI is leveraged for business insights and the unique experience of their taproom. The conversation wraps up with thoughts on flavor creation and future expansion plans.

Here's what you'll learn:
🤝 Building a strong team is crucial for success.
🛍️ Product quality is the foundation of any business.
💸 E-commerce can be more profitable than retail distribution.
💰 Amazon offers a vast marketplace but comes with challenges.
🤝 Crowdsourcing leads can enhance distribution efforts.
🤖 AI can provide valuable insights from data analysis.
❤️ Understanding customer preferences is key to product development.
🔁 A unique customer experience fosters brand loyalty.
🍺 Non-alcoholic beer can be crafted with traditional brewing methods.
🚀 Expansion requires strategic planning and market analysis.

Timestamps:
00:00 From Ford to Brewing: Joe Chura's Journey
03:05 Building a Strong Team and Product Quality
06:03 E-commerce vs. Retail: The Growth Strategy
08:49 Navigating Amazon: Pros and Cons for Non-Alcoholic Beer
12:01 Building vs. Buying: Tech Solutions in the Alcohol Industry
14:58 Crowdsourcing Leads: Innovative Distribution Strategies
17:57 Leveraging AI for Business Insights
20:50 Expansion Plans: Growing Beyond 20 States
24:07 Creating Flavor: The Science Behind Non-Alcoholic Beer
26:51 Tasting Room Experience: Engaging with Customers
29:57 Final Thoughts and Future Directions

Joe Chura:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joechura/

Go Brewing - https://gobrewing.com/

Brandon Amoroso:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/

Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/

X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon

Scalis.ai - https://scalis.ai/

Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, thanks for listening to the drinkscom podcast, the business of online alcohol. I'm your host, brandon Amoroso, and today I'm talking with Joe Shira, who's the founder and CEO at GoBrewing. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks, brandon, for having me. So, before we jump into things here, can you give everybody just some background on yourself, your story, how you began Go Brewing to begin with?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I am an entrepreneur. I started my career at Ford Motor Company working on the assembly line in 1998, which many of you are too young to remember that age, if you were even born yet but I started there, worked my way up through the Ford assembly plant, ended up in the automotive space in the early 2000s, surrounded by dealers that didn't really know a lot about what was coming in terms of the internet. It was the de facto kind of digital guru in the Chicago region for Ford Motor Company and that led me to create a digital marketing agency in 2011. 2013 created a software company called Dealer Inspire and I grew that to 450 employees, many millions of dollars in revenue and and really was kind of boots on the ground, from coding some of the first versions to understanding how traffic work and attribution and have a patent in attribution.

Speaker 2:

Developed a love for online commerce and sold the businesses in 2018 and stayed on as the CEO. Then I was the chief innovation officer at Carscom, the parent company that had bought us, and along that time I started drinking more than I should have. I didn't know a ton about how to make beer, but knew the industry was poised to at least do what it's doing, maybe not at the same velocity, but I knew the future of beverage at least I thought had something to do with non-alcoholic space as well, and the fact that you could sell online really interested me, because previous to that, I mean many beers and beverages that had alcohol or even non-alcohol they weren't being sold online. So I knew I could collect enough customer data to play at retail, and that's essentially what what we did in 2022. Started brewing on my garage. 23 we launched and here we are in 24. We're going to be in 20 states, sold 40, some 1000 customers online and growing the business rapidly 10x from last year.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome. That's a. That is quite the transition, though, from from cars to alcohol. It is yeah what? What are some of the? I guess you know takeaways from the previous business that you know you're applying to the, to the current one, albeit, you know, in very different sort of verticals.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, in any business it requires creating the best team possible around you. And the last business I felt early on that I kind of had to do everything and I had to learn everything, and this business is similar in the way that I want my hands in everything. But I really built a good team around me. I knew it was important for us to get speed to market and I have an amazing team that has been curated and coming from places that had a ton of experience in from retail to brewing, to packaging and many of the aspects that we have to deal with here to be a growing company many of the aspects that we have to deal with here to be a growing company. But probably the most important thing was product quality. Product is vital and I was very naive getting into this space and I didn't even consider contract manufacturing, and sometimes I pinched myself that I didn't, and other times I'm so grateful that I didn't, because it really gives us control of the process and that quality aspect, which is what makes Go unique and what makes us competitive in the space.

Speaker 2:

If the liquid wasn't good, I could be the best marketer in the world, I could be the best e-commerce guy on the planet and it wouldn't really matter. So product led both companies. And then customer service was another huge aspect for me. In that the last company we were getting up to 15,000 support tickets a month, but we would have great SLAs. We take care of customers and we really built our reputation on that and in e-com. I don't know if you had this experience, Brandon, but many times when you buy something online, the e-commerce customer service part of that lacks and we're like why don't we be excellent here, give consumers confidence, Because that's a big part of the experience as well. So taking that product and service aspect and applying it to this business was certainly vital.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I noticed on your site you guys are using Gorgias, which is, you know there's a lot that's come out there in the last even year with. You know AI and how you can help. You know your support team do more with less and you know, get faster response times and better customer support. But you're right, like the customer service experience, especially within the alcohol industry, historically has been, you know, not great online In person it's been really good, but online it's like you got to. You know, not great. Online in person it's been really good, but online it's like you gotta. You know, pick up a phone and try and call in and there's like no self-service options or anything like that, especially if there's a continuity or a or a club program. You know they they don't actually want it to be easy for you to cancel.

Speaker 1:

You have to jump through you know 45 different hoops and you and over time that is not positive for the company and for the brand. It might be short-term keeping around some additional revenue, but it's actually better. Shocker it doesn't sound shocking saying this, but it's actually better when your customers can manage their programs easily and have a good customer experience. Yeah, no, that's right on.

Speaker 2:

We have a beer club with yeah, no, that's right on. We have a beer club with 1400 members and growing and and then we give people that very easy, like one click and you could pause it, you could cancel and you know if, if they do, that's on us. I mean many people do cause they just have too much beer in our fridge. That's the number one reason someone would pause or cancel, which I get. I've been certainly been there before on a subscription basis, but it's also giving them like new things. Uh, make an exciting to be part of the program. We just launched this new pumpkin beer it's called Funkin Pumpkin and, uh, I only made it available to the beer club members cause I only had enough for them, and I think something like that is really special in that we are putting our money where our mouth is and we're investing and nurturing that community.

Speaker 1:

What really came first for you? Was it the e-commerce presence or was it retail? And now are you really looking at like retail-led growth or is e-comm sort of leading the charge? And then you can go to a retailer and say, hey, we don't have a presence in Minnesota, but if you look at like our Shopify sales in these particular areas for these particular demographics, we have great sales velocity in that particular area.

Speaker 2:

You kind of nailed it. My business plan was to do everything e-comm first, which again is very unique in the space, and then build the data story to then go into retailers and then talk to them about the fact that we have this database that's growing, that I could target consumers and lead them into your stores. And it's funny because retailers and distributors they get nervous when you're a direct-to-consumer brand. And I think it's incredibly more powerful to're a direct-to-consumer brand. And I think it's incredibly more powerful to be a direct-to-consumer brand because you're creating this omni-channel experience. And then there's a reason why the store makes sense because it's going to be cheaper, like the beers online are going to be, you know, 30% higher, because you know there's a lot of extra cost to ship them to the consumer. And the stores are there. You know you're going to get a deal.

Speaker 2:

So for us to have a system where we regularly create a flow and push people to these retailer websites. We also have technology with rebates. We have a retailer ambassador program that we, we crowdsource our customers, we find and curate the ones that would be good stewards of our brands and we ask them to give us leads when they're out at restaurants or establishments to send those in. So we built some tech through a Shopify app that we built for that and it's just really. Retailers are starting to get it. They're starting to like that story and I didn't know any other way, but I knew that that was the best place to start. And the other thing is for product iteration and styles and flavor and what people would gravitate to. The online focus is so critical for us, like we wouldn't. We wouldn't have been able to succeed in retail if we had not known or had data points to see what beers would actually resonate with the consumers.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think the data aspect is one that is such a big differentiator for a variety of reasons, but to be able to have that one-to-one relationship with the customer and get the insights and feedback and do things like your beer club and have a little bit more of a you know, unique uh customer experience. But at the same time, you know, I've heard from uh companies who are either alcohol or or non out um cause we, you know, used to work with a lot of CPG brands that you know this type of packaging and format is not phenomenal when it comes to easily shipped, the margins and whatnot that are associated with it. So how have you strategized or worked around that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's really a math equation on what you can afford as far as your cat cost and your total cost all in. But I mean, the easy math is this the average case is $55. You look at free shipping over a certain threshold. Average order value is over $43. The customer retention rate is 55%. So I have a first sale.

Speaker 2:

I wouldn't say profitability, but it equates to my revenue from the first sale is more than my acquisition costs for the first sale and 55% of those customers are coming back. So whereas if you look at retail, yeah, you might not have those shipping costs and you might not have that acquisition cost per se, but you're also selling it to a wholesaler, distributor for a lot less. So the net effect is e-commerce is more profitable for us than distribution and the top line revenue growth it's obviously nearly double. That said, the volume in the future, I believe, is going to be largely made up from retail for our brand specifically and that's not considering too that you know on the Amazon channel we're amongst the top non-alcoholic breweries on there as well.

Speaker 1:

What are your thoughts on? You know Amazon versus Shopify, and you're in a unique position because most of the folks that you know that we speak with have products that have alcohol in them and they can't sell them on Amazon. So it's pretty much just Shopify and retail, but in your case you have that Amazon distribution channel. So what are some of the pros and cons to working with the 800-pound gorilla that is Amazon?

Speaker 2:

The pros are pretty obvious. They have an insanely large marketplace. The intent of someone there is really good. Someone's putting in the search engine in Amazon non-alcoholic beer. We want to show up like this and there's many, many people doing that on a daily basis, so they've curated the audience.

Speaker 2:

The negative effects that I found are also maybe obvious that when you buy from Amazon as a retailer and supplier, I don't get that data. I can't reach back out to those people and talk to them. There's some automated responses that you could do to get surveys, but Amazon doesn't pass over their information. And that makes sense, right? Because look at how much we buy from Amazon. If we got hit with every single supplier that hit us that we bought on Amazon, our email boxes would be worse than they are. So I totally get it, but that's a disadvantage.

Speaker 2:

The other disadvantage is they change the rules. Often when you're in an area like non-alcoholic beer, it could get flagged for alcohol. They can say which they have, like non-alcoholic beer is not allowed on FBA, and then they'll go back and they'll change it and then there's just really confusing, conflicting rules when it comes to our product specifically, and there's certain states that we can't sell our product to that. Do consider a beer. So it gets pretty convoluted quickly and that creates risk for a brand like ours. Because if you have something in FBA and for those that don't know the difference between how you can sell on Amazon, there's a few other ways as well, but for this example there's FBA stands for Fulfilled by Amazon.

Speaker 2:

So what a company like ours does is we will put a bunch of pallets on a truck, those pallets go to an Amazon center, amazon checks it in and that's when you get the prime badge and anyone who purchases through us that Amazon facility. They fulfill that order. And then there's FBM, which is fulfilled by merchant and that would be very similar to like a Shopify order. So it connects to our Shopify account. It just comes in through the Amazon marketplace, but it's our own fulfillment here as well. Or a 3PL, which would be like an outside party who would fulfill that. So it's, you know they, they change the rules, sometimes things get lost. You have a lot of inventory in in some place, but and to you it's everything, it's Amazon, it's nothing. You know. That's a big disadvantage that we lost sleep over.

Speaker 1:

Yes, you know they have, definitely. I mean, I've heard stories where you know FBA is really a blessing and a curse, you know, because you are sort of at the whims of, you know, this giant corporation and you know if you end up in the wrong pile or if you're not getting you know the right communication channels, then you know you can be really in a bad place. There was one in particular that you know they were like impacted around the holiday season and so they basically missed out on, you know, like three weeks of some of those peak sales because of some nuance within FBA that you know, really, really screwed them over.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, it's real man, I live it. The you also need to have dedication to it. You can't, you can't wing it, even if you go through a third party. You need eyes on it. It's your party, it's your product and there's a lot, a lot of back and forth, a lot of emails. It's just, it's. It's a lot. It's like taking care of a another child.

Speaker 1:

When it comes to, you mentioned that you had, uh, you know, built in an app. Um, so what? What are your thoughts around you buying off-the-shelf tools? Because the alcohol industry, historically, has had to deal with a lot of custom proprietary tech because of the rules and regulations around being able to ship direct-to-consumer when there is an ABV percentage, you know, especially, you know, wine's the easiest beer's you know.

Speaker 1:

Second, and then distilled is very challenging, but it's been a lot of proprietary tech. And now they're sort of dealing with the ramifications of that, because there's a lot of tech that's very hard to maintain and you have these massive platforms like Shopify that you know the speed of innovation at which they're moving is, you know, impossible to be matched by an in-house team. But at the same time, there are, you know, instances where you know there isn't something off the shelf that you can use. So how do you go about? You know that evaluation process and what makes you say, you know, yeah, well, you know, we're going to double down on this and actually build it ourselves, versus we should be looking at an off the shelf solution.

Speaker 2:

It really depends what it is. I appreciate your question, though. This is a fun one to answer, because if if someone is not using Shopify and they have an e-commerce business and they're looking for a tool, sort of build themself, that I would think that is a very, very foolish move. Shopify has so much infrastructure. They make everything easy. Compliance it's well, well worth what it is. It's incredible.

Speaker 2:

I came from building WordPress websites. We built 10,000, literally 10,000 WordPress websites and I go over to Shopify and I'm like this is unbelievable. And the plugins, the systems like Klaviyo and everything else you could use to plug in here. I was just I was I'm still like blown away by the value that they provide. Honestly, what what I where I run into like the builders buy. If it's out there and it fits my needs, I'm going to try to use it, because I'm not, because I'm not in the software game per se anymore. I'm not selling software. However, I think I'm going to end up at some place where I'm creating a separate entity, because I can't help but look at the issues in the space and create software to solve some of those, and one of the big things that I realized the software that we built is really has to do with the model of account reps.

Speaker 2:

I went on a ride-along a year and a half ago with someone and I spent an eight to ten hour day going to six or seven places where we were just waiting around for the decision maker to come in, and I'm not going to say it was a complete waste of time, but 90% of it was wasteful. I'm not going to say it was a complete waste of time, but 90% of it was wasteful. And although I love that experience it, it I was thinking about like just a reps efforts and certainly this doesn't apply to all reps out there by any means, but for our beer we don't sell enough to each establishment being non-alcoholic beer to justify reps in all these areas Like it just doesn't pencil out right Versus alcohol. So I was like, okay, how do we solve that? So we we built some tech to really curate and crowdsource our teams and to provide a low friction way for for everyday customers that we have to send us leads on on-premise places that they're going to anyway.

Speaker 2:

So if, for example, brandon, if you're out and about today and you go to a restaurant by your house and we happen to have distribution in your area. That's the caveat. It's only areas where we have distribution in, which is now 20 states. But if you're out and about, you literally can send us information via a mobile texting app that we built and we get that as a lead and then we can follow up with that lead. And how that would look is you just go in the restaurant and you're like, hey, you have any non-alcoholic beer, and they're like yeah or no, or whatever they say.

Speaker 2:

You know your response is have you heard of GoBrewing? You should try it. And if they're like, yeah, we'd love to try it, well, you send us that information and we'll get that beer there pretty quickly. So that's the way we approach it, and the software that we built is very low friction on both the user's end. And then that pushes to a CRM kind of this makeshift one that we built now through Google Sheets. And as this develops more and more and if it's worth it and it's working, I'll build out other systems, more alerts, I'll integrate with VIP. I'm going to do a lot of really cool things to make it super easy. But you know, right now this is just a really low cost way to trial out. My theory is that we can use our team members to crowdsource these efforts.

Speaker 1:

No, that's awesome.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I think that's, you know, something that a lot of brands want to have, but it's a lot more difficult in practice to, you know, to get your customers to be that word of mouth for you unless you have, you know, a very unique and compelling product and customer experience, and so I mean that's definitely a testament to you and the company you're building that you actually have people who are, who are willing to do that, cause I've, you know, seen the back ends of so many, you know, referral programs that have pretty much zero traction. Um, whether it's for a wholesale accounts or, you know more traditionally, for, you know, just referring friends to, to a particular uh, to a particular brand.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, it's we. We have people that are so active in this that they're sending 20, 30 leads, closing 10, 15 a month. Uh, more than If maybe if I had a full time job, and some are taking it extremely seriously in there. We're incentivizing them to do so, because it's not all. We can explore those boundaries without violating any state laws too.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, when it comes to distribution. You know how are you thinking about expansion beyond those, those 20 states?

Speaker 2:

Well, the 20 states are really new to us. So we had, uh, we entered this year with like four states, four or five states, um, so we just brought on a bunch. We're launching the East coast. Uh, by the time this comes out, wegmans, which is a huge chain on the East coast. We're launching that. We have a, uh, another huge chain in the Midwest that we're going to be launching and, uh, and our focus is on some bigger states out West. So really, right now, we wanted to own the Midwest first, but by happenstance, we had some opportunities out East, so we really focused on those and now we're going to start moving out West. So it's been very intentional. As things pop up and people reach out to us or we find a good fit with a distributor or retailer, it really allows us to kind of pivot and navigate the waters in a different way.

Speaker 1:

One last question for you before we get into the two fun ones Are there any ways that you are leveraging? Well, obviously there are going to be ways, but what are some of the like the most beneficial ways that you've leveraged AI? You know this year and improving, you know certain components of, you know your business operations, or you know marketing or whatever it may be.

Speaker 2:

Do I have leveraged AI? You said yeah.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, I mean, it's a great question. So I don't even know if like analytics platforms are useful anymore. You can put so much in. Let's call it chat GPT. I know there's a bunch of them, but chat GPT is one I like to play with probably the most. You can put so much data in there and analyze it from Google Analytics to Shopify data to product data, and the cool thing about it and it'd be really hard to do with another platform is you can build on it. You just build, build, build so you can take one set of data and you can get an output. You could add your reviews. I imported all our reviews.

Speaker 2:

I tried to understand what problems we're solving for people. Then I take that data and I use it for our marketing, because in marketing, you want to talk about problems you're solving. That's one example. You look at different beers that are resonating. What are they talking about? Is it the flavor profiles? Is it the calories?

Speaker 2:

That really led us to create more packaging AI from for zero party data, that is, post purchase survey data you buy on our website. We ask some questions, we take that, we put that, we have the AI systems and just that. And the cool thing is, every one thing I'm talking about is like one long thread of data that in the end, you're like okay, who are my personas? And you can use that for marketing, you can understand, for product development, like what's working. You can look at where your website traffic's coming from, where your strongest loyalty base is. Like, one of our top markets is California and we don't have distribution there, but we sell a lot of direct to consumer there. So it allows us to then analyze that in the future and say, okay, well, you know, when we're ready to open up California, we at least have enough data and and proof to talk about it intelligently to a retailer.

Speaker 1:

Now the the reviews one is is is something that and really to your point about analytics, uh, I agree with you. Like I think so many analytics platforms are just like visualizations, but they're not actually giving you the insights, and that's what you're doing with all the things that you just mentioned is taking that raw data and then it's like, okay, great, now what the hell do I actually do with this?

Speaker 1:

And it's really closing out that end piece there and making it so much more accessible to businesses of all sizes that aren't these giant corporations anymore.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, just a recent example. We got our reviews back from GABF, the big beer festival, and there's a 21-page PDF. I added that to ChatGPT and I said what are strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and what would you do differently? Send that to a brewing team done? I did read them all first, but that's just an example. It summarized them perfectly.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm very excited to see how it will continue to evolve and allow us to be more productive and spend more time thinking strategically and creatively, versus, you know, having to do a lot of these like manual processes or the summarization of stuff, when that can just be handled like like that now.

Speaker 2:

Yep.

Speaker 1:

Well, enough with the uh, the uh, the serious questions. Let's jump into the two, the two fun ones. So, um, I did give you a little bit of a warning on these two, but uh, what? Let's start with the first one, which is what? What is your favorite uh alcohol memory?

Speaker 2:

you know, non-alcohol or or or actual alcohol a favorite, as in fun I would say, um, there's. So I had my own apartment in high school. So I go back to the time when I was really drinking a lot it where I grew up on the southeast side of Chicago, like there was just a ton of people looking to have a good time always and my place would seem to be always available. So I think that in itself lends it to these memories of alcohol. If I had to like correlate a time period in my life with heavy drinking, that is it for sure. And that is also where I learned I came to death's door pretty closely and drinking way too much on an occasion which I continuously think about now, and how dumb I was in certain times in my life when I was younger.

Speaker 2:

And that was just a. You know, there's also a bit of negative memories, but like I don't look back at life and and regret things per se, I look at them as like those are lessons to learn and if you keep repeating them then it's silly, you know. So that was, that was one, but there's a, there's many, I'm sure. I'm sure you have many too.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I grew up on the Northwest side of Chicago Um. No, get out of here yeah, lake Zurich, lake Zurich and.

Speaker 2:

North no way. Small world yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I was actually back in Chicago it's like two weeks ago, did a Cubs game. But are you a White Sox fan?

Speaker 2:

I'm a Cubs fan. Actually it's weird. I know Like South Sider that's a cubs fan. Actually it's weird. I know like south cider, that's a that's a cubs fan. But a long story behind that.

Speaker 1:

But, yeah, cubs, well, we can debate which pizza is the best after this, uh, after this podcast. But, um, it is still a hot topic and I have friends who will come there and I'm like you're wrong and they're like, no, you're wrong, and I think the are you?

Speaker 2:

are you a deep dish guy or thin crust guy?

Speaker 1:

uh, generally thin crust, but like, if I'm gonna go home, I'm, I'm gonna get you know deep dish, and I grew up eating chardonnays and I liked it more than than luminatis. Oh man, we differ there yeah, I love lube it's an unpopular opinion like the the more people that I talk to about it. Pretty much everybody likes luminati's and I'm the only one that likes uh, that likes giordano's have you had the loose crustless pizza, luminati's crustless? No, I have not.

Speaker 2:

They have crustless yeah, so check this out. They use, they make a crust out of the sausage and so it's. It's essentially like carb free, and then they build on that, so it's like the crust is sausage, then it's cheese and then tomato sauce and then more sausage. It's like so bad for you, but it's amazing too.

Speaker 1:

I actually I think I have had this because I was keto for a while and, and you know, obviously you can't have pizza if you, I was keto for a while yeah.

Speaker 1:

And you know, obviously you can't have pizza if you're keto, and so I went down the rabbit's hole of some of these, like you know, interesting and unique takes on pizza, but I am very much so glad to be just eating regular pizza again, right, yeah, well, the last question if you could share a bottle with anyone, you know what would it be and, or sorry, who would it be and what would you drink.

Speaker 2:

I mean, today I would take my any beer and I would. I would have a meeting with Jeff Bezos. I think that would be the person that I would like to hang out with and just pick his brain and talk about innovation. I think his story is incredible, like many entrepreneurs, and what he's done to build this marketplace. There's so much to learn from. But yeah, I think it would be non-alcoholic beer today. I would want to remember the whole thing.

Speaker 1:

Yes, that that definitely helps with the with the non-alcoholic. One completely unrelated question, but you know how do you get the actual flavor profile? You know that to be, you know, close or or similar to. You know beer when you're not like you don't have you know the alcohol in it. So is that you know beer when you're not like you don't have you know the alcohol in it. So is that, you know replaced by sugar content or like how? What is some of the science that you know behind, how you can actually create this?

Speaker 2:

yeah, I tell people it's half magic, half science, but the reality is there's still alcohol in our beer. It's just under 0.55%. And if you came into our brewery and you watched the process, you would have no idea that the output was going to be non-alcoholic beer. It's really a product of time, temperature and ratio and a proprietary system that we developed, really from my garage. We were kind of forced to not use a de-alkalizer early on, because that's how we launched, like we weren't going to launch if we couldn't figure it out how to do it without it. Just because we, you, you can't really half-ass that, and that's why many people, as you know, contract brew, because you to build the infrastructure for a brewery in general is crazy. And then you're now you're de-alkalizing. Not only do you have to get that machine, but a ton of utilities to go with it, and then you need a pasteurizer on top of it.

Speaker 2:

So there's the non-alcoholic beer. Space is not an easy one to just dive into, so that is, uh, that's, you know, some of the things that I I knew and didn't know getting in, getting into this. But the flavor profiles are using almost the same exact ingredients that you'd find in a beer of that style with alcohol, so like, for example, our Pilsner uses German malt in it and it uses hops, the same ones that any other beer would use. We use the same mosaic as any other beer would use, so there's nothing like we don't push sugar in it or anything like that. We've just really developed this finesse to make the beer taste like the appropriate style. And because it's not de-alkalized, you don't really get that after flavor that you can get otherwise.

Speaker 1:

Got it? No, it is unique. I didn't realize there was a difference between the, you know, de-alcoholizing it or not. That's really cool. But yeah, that is definitely a lot of time and investment on that front to not go the contract brewing route. Do you have, like, is there a tasting room style business in the same way that there is with, you know, like some of the wineries that we talked to, and tours and you know things like that?

Speaker 2:

I used to think we were the only non-alcoholic brewery in Illinois. I think we might be the only one in the nation with like an actual tap room that you could go to and have 14 different NA beers on tap. We have programming every weekend live music. We have athletic events. We have programming every weekend, live music, we have athletic events, we have storytelling. We have all kinds of stuff. So it's yeah, go brewingcom. You could look at our events if you're in the chicago area. So we have that absolutely. We don't have like program tours because traffic is uh, unpredictable sometimes, but we have anyone that has an interest, anyone listening to this podcast that can hit me up. If they're in the area, I can give them a tour. We also have another facility we've invested in and partnered with, a mile away from here that we now do a lot of manufacturing out of, because we outgrew our current brewery in terms of capacity. So there's a lot to look at, a lot to see, a lot of automation that we're building. It's pretty cool. So we absolutely have that though.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's awesome. Where is it located?

Speaker 2:

We're in Naperville.

Speaker 1:

Oh, okay, I fly back into Chicago tomorrow night, so I might have to….

Speaker 2:

There you go, man Come by.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I appreciate you coming on and joining me today, and I think you just mentioned it. But just to reiterate before we hop where can people find you online?

Speaker 2:

Online gobrewingcom on Amazon as well, and then you could go to our store locator to look at the stores that we're in near you. In Chicagoland. We're in all the major chains Ohio, wisconsin, michigan, all the same. Now we're launching Pennsylvania, new York, connecticut, a ton more states there. So any of those places? We'd be honored to have your listeners try our beer and give me feedback. My email is joe at gobrewingcom. Would love to hear from you too awesome.

Speaker 1:

Well, again, I appreciate it for everybody who's listening. As always, this is brandon maroso. You can find us at drinkscom and we'll see you next time. Thanks, brandon.