This is our first blog attempt that takes an inside and personal look at several aspects of the brewing industry. If you are interested in contributing to this section of the website please contact John Lauckner at johnlauckner@gmail.com.

Sarah Aldrich is the Marketing Assistant for Founders Brewing Company and can be contacted at saldrich32@gmail.com. For more information on Founders Brewing Company visit http://www.foundersbrewing.com/.

Sarah Aldrich, Marketing Assistant at Founders Brewing Company and Professional Writing Alum from Michigan State University.

Background

Founders Brewing Company is a microbrewery based out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. We were founded in 1997—12 years after Bell’s Brewery, the biggest microbrewery in Michigan (some of you may be familiar with their popular summer beer Oberon). We’ve been growing quickly in recent years, moving to a new facility in 2007, with a larger production facility and a bigger taproom (aka bar), and completing a sizable expansion just last month.

Also, because of laws that were passed shortly after Prohibition, we have to work through a distributor in order to get our beer to stores, bars, and restaurants. It’s called a “three-tier” system: we sell our beer to our distributors (we have 25 that are spread out geographically—the most being in Michigan because it’s where we sell the most beer), who pick it up at our production facility, bring it to their warehouses, and then sell it and deliver it to retail accounts. This is how it works in most states.

The Job

I work as a marketing assistant. When I started in May of last year, I doubled the size of our marketing department, joining one of our two owners. We have around 80 employees right now, most working in our taproom and deli as bartenders, servers, and cooks. Working in a small company, my job changes quite a bit from day-to-day—flexibility is key.

Founders Brewing Company Tap Room located in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Most mornings I come in and catch up on emails and our Twitter and Facebook accounts. Because most people drink beer in the evenings, they tend to comment about what they’re drinking at night—I can’t always be on, but my research has shown that it’s important to respond as quickly as possible when it comes to social media. We also get quite a few emails to our “info” email account that get routed to me—questions, requests for sponsorships, media requests, etc. This ends up being almost like customer service work because I have to keep in mind that not everyone understands how our business or industry works, even though I’m so close to it, and we all know that the internet can lead to trolling and outbursts. It can be an interesting experience to answer complex questions or put out fires in 140 characters on Twitter; talk about the importance of rhetoric and editing.

The rest of my day is spent updating our website with event listings, headers, polls, blog posts, and the like; responding to media requests; developing ads, banners, and promotional materials; helping coordinate my boss’ schedule; meeting with printers, our web designer, and other people who are interested in partnering with us; choosing what new merchandise we should order; organizing festivals and making sure our beer gets to different places for competitions; coordinating sponsorships; and more.

Founders' Slogan: "We don’t brew beer for the masses. Instead, our beers are crafted for a chosen few, a small cadre of renegades and rebels who enjoy a beer that pushes the limits of what is commonly accepted as taste. In short, we make beer for people like us."

Part of my daily schedule is dependent on the time of the month: at the end of the month, I have a bunch of deadlines that I have to meet. I have to do inventory for the Point of Sale (POS) merchandise that we sell to our distributors; compile reports that assess our web analytics and traditional and new media presences; and plug data into a spreadsheet that documents how much beer our distributors have sold that month. I do an internal newsletter once a month and an external newsletter every other month (you can sign up here, if you’re interested: http://www.foundersbrewing.com/newsletter).

New Projects at Founders

Right now, a bunch of our focus has been on releasing some new beers in 2011. I attempted to coordinate some project management (even downloaded a free Gantt chart software) with our big release, but things fell through (I’ll go into it in a bit). It’s amazing how much goes into a new product launch: naming it, coming up with a workable description, label development (we use an outside design firm for this) and registration with the state and federal governments, development of marketing materials (sell sheets, bottle shots, posters, gear, etc), making sure our brewing and packaging schedule is coordinated with the product release…I’m probably forgetting a couple of things.

I can’t say too much about a few of these new bottled beers, but I can talk about our big planned release because it’s just about public knowledge right now anyway, and it is kind of a cool case study for a crowd interested in rhetoric: we are going to release a new beer that we have been calling Endurance Ale in our taproom for about nine months now. We sent it to the Great American Beer Festival (one of the biggest and most prestigious beer competitions around) and it won a silver medal in the session beer category. Most simply, a session beer is a beer that is 5% ABV or less. Our head brewer has been working on this one for over 2 years, perfecting it, so that it has all of the flavor and aroma of an IPA (India Pale Ale) but a lower ABV—the idea is that you can drink more of them in a single “session” of drinking.

We did some research on the name back in September and found that there was an Endurance Brewing Company in Massachusetts. We contacted our legal team to see if we would have any problems copyrighting the name, and they brought up this company, but said that we would probably be able to copyright the product as “Endurance Ale” without any problems. Then, in January, we ran into problems with this Endurance Brewing Company and are having to rename the beer. We’ve already developed labels and ordered tap handles and tattoos. We’d planned to launch the beer in April, but we are definitely not going to make that deadline anymore. It’s been a bit of a disappointment, but it’s all a part of the business. Our plan now is to develop two more label concepts and have our consumers vote for which one they prefer—and in doing so we will be transparent about why we’re making this change to raise awareness about the renaming organically.

Beer Rhetorics, Community, and People

Mugs for Founders' "Mug Club."

The cool thing about the craft beer industry is that we try to have a personal relationship with the people who drink our beer. We have 1463 people in our Mug Club this year—they pay for a membership to get a mug that we store in our taproom, plus drink deals, especially on Wednesdays, which we call Mug Club Day. Our sales representatives and our directors of sales and marketing travel to festivals, tastings, and beer dinners to interact directly with the people who drink our beer. It gives them the opportunity to tell the story behind the brewery and behind each of the beers. For example, my boss Dave talks about how our head brewer, Jeremy, came up with the basis of the Double Trouble recipe on a day that brewhouse was shut down—he asked if he could bring his dad in and experiment, and they liked what they came up with. After perfecting the recipe, it became our January–April seasonal beer.

With this first blog by Sarah, I hope to start to accomplish a few things. 1) I hope to better understand some of the inner-workings of the beer industry,  2) I hope to get a better understanding of the jobs themselves, and 3) I want to see how people interact with beer and how the beer industry interacts with people. So thanks to Sarah for giving our first spotlight, and once again if you would like to help with this section please email John at johnlauckner@gmail.com.