Brewing great beer is the most important thing any brewer can do, but in a market where differentiation isn’t measured in good versus bad but great versus also great, it’s increasingly important for breweries to put time, thought, and effort into the brands they’re building. Whether your focus is taproom sales, limited releases of tradable bottles, or main-line core brands in a multi-state footprint, these eight elements of branding should be first and foremost in your mind.
At the Core of Every Great Brand Is Values
Before they named their company or brewed their first beer, Urban Chestnut Brewing Company (St. Louis, Missouri) Founders David Wolfe and Florian Kuplent started with a statement of values. As former AB-InBev employees—Wolfe on the marketing side, Kuplent on the technical-brewing side—they were familiar with building brand-positioning statements when launching new beers for the international behemoth, but this was personal and a departure since it focused not on the customer they were trying to attract for a certain beer, but on the very nature of the company they wanted to create.
“We looked at ourselves and decided … to focus on the tension between Florian’s old-world technique and styles and a modern, creative approach to brewing,” Wolfe says. “We articulated that by defining the divergent ideals of ‘reverence’ and ‘revolution,’ and that philosophy expresses itself in everything from the beer styles we’ve focused on (from reverential traditional German-style lagers to very contemporary hoppy IPAs) to the name of our brewery. ‘Urban’ expresses that contemporary energy, while ‘Chestnut’ is a nod to the trees and roots commonly found in German beer gardens.”