Reverie: The Name Was The Easy Part
The Situation
Reverie Brewing Company almost had a different name. One of my partners had picked one and pushed it through without much conversation. I didn’t connect with it and said so. The trademark came back rejected, too close to another brewery, and the question was open again.
We went into ideation, which is my favorite part of any project. A hundred ideas, none of them right. So we stopped and I asked the question underneath “why does anyone here want to own a brewery?” Every answer came back to the same thing. It had been a dream. Reverie means to be lost in your own thoughts. That was the name, and the motto followed. Don’t quit your daydream.
What Was Actually Broken
Craft brewing runs on an assumption that the beer is the brand. Get the product right and everything else is signage. It’s why most taprooms are interchangeable once you’re inside one.
I never bought it. My position from day one was that the name was an operating instruction, not a label, and that every program in the building had to answer to it or it was just a word on a wall. That’s not a hard position to hold in a meeting. It’s hard to hold for seven years, because there is always something more urgent than the brand, and the argument has to be made again every week against a business that is on fire in some new way.
The Turning Point
Nothing turned. I just kept translating the idea into things that ran.
The experimental IPA program. 36 releases starting with “Oo, a pony” in March 2019, roughly one every two months for six and a half years. Every one named “Oo a tugboat!” or something equally ridiculous. The point was to daydream about the beer while drinking something you’d never had before. The name was doing product development, not marketing.
The mug club evolved. My partners wanted one and hated storing hundreds of glasses behind the bar, which is a fair operational objection that kills the program at most places. I have a CNC mill, so I built custom wood coasters and a thin shelf mounted off the cooler. Year one, 100 members at $75. By the time I left, 200 at the same price, with almost no carrying cost and no bar real estate. The wall also became a community mural, members started taking coasters home and decorating them, and the wall developed a personality nobody designed. That’s the difference between a loyalty program and a brand people join.
The Small Business Relief beer. March 2020, we were closed by government order to prevent the spread of COVID. I had already bought ingredients for the next experimental IPA release. While we at least had the distribution channel outside the taproom, many small businesses were stuck with no option and no clear next step from the government. I proposed we take that beer and use the proceeds to provide twenty $500 microgrants to local businesses that qualified on the basis of having no alternate revenue during the shutdown. Ten thousand dollars, deployed in weeks. Most of them paid it back voluntarily years later once their revenue returned. Nobody asked them to.
The events slate. Three tentpoles a year, another three or four midsize, plus trivia, holidays markets, coaster club parties, run clubs, releases, and more. Punk rock Halloween. Multiple renaissance faires. Cider and mead program. An annual trail cleanup funded by five percent of a beer, around $900 a year to a local cause.
What Changed
Our two most profitable years were our second and third, the first two years of the pandemic, while breweries around us were closing. We peaked at $1MM in earnings. That came from moving fast into self distribution while continuing to run the brand hard instead of going quiet.
With that growth it was clear it was time to expand. All of a sudden a canning line arrived, two more tanks that could hold another 1,20 gallons of wort, production accelerated, more kegs were ordered and I learned the thing this case study is actually about.
Growth does not reduce operational load. It multiplies it, and it multiplies it fastest on the person who says yes to everything. I never hired anyone to take enough work off my plate. So I learned the canning line. When the chiller went down, I figured out how to jump it until I could order parts to fix it. I redid all the plumbing for the glycol and steam so we could be more efficient. Built the back bar and the event space that organically drove $275K a year, no advertising. Bent a broken forty foot tent pole between the legs of a fermenter because the event was that night. Built fifty flight holders in two days when an order went wrong before opening, and they’re still in use seven years later. Fixed two garage doors myself in emergencies because Overhead Door couldn’t get there in time. Went and got a bookkeeping certificate because the books needed to be right and waiting wasn’t producing a result.
None of that is a hero story. Every hour of it was an hour not spent on the business, and a lot of it was an hour not spent with my family. The brand kept growing and the person driving it kept getting further from the work that made it grow. That is a structural failure, not a work ethic problem, and it’s the one I’m best at spotting in someone else’s organization now because I lived inside it for years without naming it.
Frank’s Take
During my time in advertising my favorite part of the job was getting to learn a new brand and pitch them solutions for their brief. It’s fun, challenging, and at times taxing. Most agency people don’t jump brand side, and most brand people don’t relish a career in advertising.
What I did was a bit different. I didn’t go brand side. I built the brand, owned it, and lived with it long enough to find out what a positioning idea actually costs to run on a Tuesday in February. I know which promises survive contact with a staff, a P&L, and a broken steam boiler, and which ones quietly get abandoned in month four while everyone keeps agreeing we should get back to it.
Reverie still runs. The coaster wall is still there. The flight holders are still there. Many of the beers are still my art, recipes and descriptions. That’s what a brand actually is, the things that keep working after the person who made them leaves.
Our motto was don’t quit your daydream. I still haven’t.