Nick Kaga, Welcome to the mentor mate.

Thanks Mark, it's great to be here.

Are you up from Melbourne though, Yeah, up from Melbourne, Talkie you sit down on the.

Coast, Talkie O get beautiful down there.

It's a pretty good little spot hide away down there.

Yeah.

You know you're the CEO and co founder of of course Better Beer, which is on display for everybody.

Have a look there it is.

I've done assure you with your beer.

I did see that.

We we use that in some of our marketing collateral.

We've got a complaint.

Come on the field.

We've got to complaint and had to take it down.

From the camp, from the advertising councils or.

The advertising camp.

Really we had to take it down.

But we got it up there for a little bit.

And why do they what?

What for?

What was wrong with that?

It's just irresponsible consumption of alcohol.

So now yeah, well yeah, so irresponsible for a couple of reasons, like we don't know what's in the shoe when you're drinking out of it.

But at the end of the day, you can't scull a beer.

You can't trade armor beer.

So all these you know, sports stars that are doing after the events, we can't actually, yeah, do it or promoted it as part of our part of our brand.

You can't use it.

But they can do it.

They can do it all their lives, and I can do it.

Put up on and I think Anthony Albanezi scull the beer at then More Theater one night.

So I think everyone can do except for the beer company.

We might have to ralph this just to tell them.

I'm still a shoey virgin.

Are you serious?

Yeah, they just don't really entice me.

I leave it for the younger crew.

All but tired to of us Govin to do my very first shoey and he famously is you know, shoey two of us here.

But I did one with with him with his beer.

Yeah, and of course I've done one with the boys, your partners, and they'll be so okay, let's talk about it, Nick, let's talk about it.

So you're pretty young bloke, and I know you guys are killing it and Better Beer is killing it.

Tell me a little bit about how what was your first inkling that a beer called better Beer could be something that might kick off in Australia.

Yeah, it's really interesting.

So my journey in beer and alcohol and venues has been long, almost too long.

I'm forty hours so sort of being involved.

In it, you're a baby gone, I'm starting.

To feel So yeah, my journey, it's taken a while to get to a point where we've had something at scale.

So I suppose back in the early days of when I was sort of working out what sort of company I would have sort of moving forward, it was in that drink's innovation world.

So I loved creating products, go to market strategies, pitching the retailers and seeing if something sticks.

So the old sort of throw a few darts, sort of darboard and see if something sticks and then put all your effort behind it.

So during that journey, I sort of was watching Instagram one night and saw these Alaricans dancing down the street in Kayama.

So I thought, oh, better reach out to these guys and maybe they can promote my alcoholic cam butcher product Kibooch at the time, So I reached out.

So you see, I had a kom Butcher prot had an alcoholic yeah yeah, yeah, well most butcher has a little bit about.

Yeah, it has a little bit.

So they try and ferment out the alcohol in the product and de al closet, but I wanted to put the alcohol back into it.

I love the taste of ko Butcher.

Yeah, it's quite good.

It's it's one of those products I probably you know, the old I went all in on the alcoholic kob Butcher category.

I got national ranging through Life Savings and more into it, and everything was work great, like it was a great tasting liquid.

The branding, the marketing, it all.

Was called k Booch k Butcher And how how long ago were talking about now?

I think twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, right, so yeah, yeah, so around that sort of.

I had it for a couple of years and then yeah, I saw these guys dancing on Instagram and all they sort of surfy looking, kind of funny.

Maybe I'll reach out to them.

I think they had seventeen thousand followers at the time.

Reached out to the mass if they promote the product at a music festival, offered them I think five hundred dollars to drive themselves to Canberra and promote thekom Butcher product.

And they were the old influencer deal, the old.

Influencer deal, and that was with the inspired unemployed, and I think it was their first influencer deal that they got.

That's ford AND's deal.

That's Forden's deal.

Yes.

Yeah, so as in the Uninspired Boys, yeah, the inspired now the uninspired Boys.

Sometimes they're un inspired uninspiring.

So yeah, So I knew that there was something in with those guys like Jack and Matt.

You've met them before, like they are like determined to make a success of whatever that they do, But.

You didn't know that when you're just watching them on on socials.

Yeah, I didn't know that that they had that.

But the first meeting we had, we had like deep business conversations, like they were chewing my year off about business, especially Jack.

And then subsequently we met a couple of times over the next year or two, and I was like, Oh, these guys are onto something here, and they knew it as well.

Like they went from seventeen thousand followers when I first met them to one hundred thousand before that Christmas to two point something million today, So they knew and I sort of had a feeling that they were going to be big stars.

Were just can I just stop there, because this is really important, Nick, because a lot of people listening to this sort of stuff and they're thinking about, Oh, I've got this idea, I've got a retail priority, and I only get an influencer to sort of talk about it, or a micro influencer to talk about it.

And that sounds good, like, let's like marketing one o one these days digital marketing one on one.

But there's something more to it, much more to it.

And perhaps you discovered it when you sat down with the very first time with the two boys, when they had seventy thousand followers, for example, and they grew to do something to be different fire and Bucks.

What was it?

Well, one, what was it that you did that you think, Wow, I'm glad I did that, And what was it that you discovered when you did that?

And I mean, how could you tell that they were they were a goer?

Yeah, so I suppose like I got up there to this music festival in Camera.

It was called Spilt Milk and you went there.

Yeah, I went to it.

I met them there and then I just let them do their own thing.

But by the end of the day they were sort of bored of doing whatever they were doing.

They came back and had a chat and yeah, Jack was just talking about business and opportunities and what he's going to do with the Inspired Unemployed and how big it's going to get and everything that they've got planned for the next two years, and I think like that for me, I was like came home thinking, oh, they've got something here.

Maybe I can do something with them in the future in the beverage space.

So we thought about doing a Celtza together.

We thought about doing different things, but yeah, just some of those key moments, like I suppose, I then went and met up with them a couple other times and just built that relationship and that rapport with them, so you know, when it got to the point where they were like, hang on a second, we know that we can create a product here as Inspired Unemployed and promote it and market it really well.

When it got to that point, they reached out to me.

Yeah, they reached back to you sort of thing.

Yeah, so they reversed pitched me.

So I had a drinks in innovation incubator and they came back and pitched me to do a craft beer brand, so sort of similar to a bolterer or stone and wood sort of product, you know, build a brewery and build out sort of that type of liquid, which for me like being involved in the industry so long, and seeing that there's eight hundred nine hundred craft brewers out there, all doing the same thing or with a bearded brewer, all creating amazing beers, but all playing in the small market.

So that they were playing in I think craft beer maybe eight to ten percent of all beer sold.

It's not for everyone.

So when they reverse pitched me to do sort of that craft beer, that origin story of having a brewer and the hops in the east and really talking about the product, I went back to them and said, hey, I think we might have a better opportunity here and make something that pretty much everyone in Australia can drink.

And that's sort of how we sort of formed what would become better beer.

So yeah, because a lot of as you say that after the Bolt success and during the build up to success, a lot of people sort of said, let's write on the coattails of balder b time and probably that by the way, there were a few craft beers around, it wasn't they.

I mean, and I owned a couple and they didn't do very well.

In fact, kraft bees weren't all that acceptable.

They're just people didn't give a shit about them, and the bolder sort of changed the whole vibe around and everyone thought, well, hang on, this possible, especially when they sold out.

Like everyone, I wouldn't mind repeating that sort of act and a transaction.

You the boys came to you and they reversed picture in this stage, you've got your your k butcher Butcher Seltzer, and what did you do with them?

With them?

So I suppose it probably you know, a couple of steps down the road.

But you know, being an entrepreneur, my whole life, it's always about like the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, And that really just comes from you know, two things, fear of failing at that current thing and probably a guy whose book I picked up when I was sixteen.

It wasn't yours because I would have been too young, but it was Richard Brandson's where he you know, he had so many entrepreneurial endeavors and like he was like the idol for my age group growing up.

So I was always the same.

I always had a restaurant and like a venue, and that'd be thinking of the next thing or an app or something else I could do.

So when it got to the stage where better beer was in market and actually hammering.

We just made a conscious decision to close down the other product.

Were they involved in other products?

So you just said this and I'm going to leave that because it's going too good.

Yeah, but you did run them in parallel.

Yeah, so we ran him in parallel.

So at one point I probably had four different brands in the market, so ranged in Lickland, so Dan Murphy's independent bottle shops around Australia.

But yeah, they've got to a point where it's like, hey, we've got to go all in on this thing because it is potentially the next big beer brand in Australia.

And when I say next big beer brand, like the craft guys are really good, but they're kind of like playing in a niche category that's not for everyone.

Whereas we think we can sort of take it up to the big brewers with this product.

You know, we had a choice.

We could go into a craft beer compete against eight hundred different craft breweries putting out a similar thing, or we can compete against two big global brewers, which sounds daunting, but sometimes that's where the opportunity is.

They they're like big corporate behemoths and they're hard to cut through.

With any new products, So we thought we'd just compete directly with you know, the Hans and the pure Blondes and the Carton Drys of the world.

That's an interesting strategy.

So you might explain the difference between fitting into the craft brewing category and what type of beer you need to produce or is it more about the narrative compared to competing with big brands like Toois or whatever.

Is that a do you have to produce a similar type of beer into the taste or is it is it just more about the narrative, like where are they are competing with the big guys and we're not competing with the small guys.

We don't understand that.

How does it work?

So traditionally a craft beer, it's a crafted product, so it's you know, it's a slow process, more water hops, ye East, it's really like small and localized.

It's hard to get national distribution, national scale, but it has essentially a lot more flavor.

Like you've probably drank and own craft breweries Breweris before or bootep breweries back in when you were doing it.

There's a lot more flavor pro beer.

As one of moment Byron Baby, Yeah, the one from Borron.

Yeah, we end up selling everything, but because we could make any.

Money, yeah yeah, yeah, it can be tough because.

You know, of course we couldn't get into the liquor stores.

We could, but they had us at the back, and people don't buy at the back, and to get at the front, you had to drop your price exactly.

It was pro sensitive and it's so hard, and I think you know that nearly goes to where the success of Better Beer came from.

We didn't just launch a product and put it on the back shelf and hands selling.

We went and partnered with Dance and BWS and did an exclusive deal with them for three years.

We would be up the front of the sawce.

So we did a proper product launch into the market like one of the major brewers would do, and that meant that everyone could find it straight away.

So as soon as you saw the marketing or heard about Better Beer, you'd walk in a bottle shop with Dan's BWS, you'd see it and you'd buy it.

You wouldn't have to go hunting and asking the store manager and he'd have it out the back.

How does that happen?

Explain that to me?

So I'm I'm obviously your that's your experience from having done this stuff before.

But you you're launching a bit better a beer better be but you're launching your beer with dem of his and what did you talk to.

The not quite the CEO.

But we have had some interactions with Steve over the years.

Yeah, So when we're coming up with the business plan how to take it to the market, we knew that we had a liquid and we can go back to the difference between crafty and macro.

That's just that first, and then and then cut into it, how do you then do launcher marketing plan?

So, and the difference between like ourb is there macro lagers.

So you know, you go anywhere in the world and the number one beer is always a macro lager.

So it's a high gravity brewed beer.

So you brew it high gravity.

What's that mean?

It means you brew it to like six percent and then you filter it down alcohol alcohol, and then you filter it down with reverse osmosis water and you just get those synergies, which is what macro beer is.

Let's just I've never heard of that, so I should have been.

I didn't get involved in my beer business, but macro tell me about it.

So it's all about like economies of scale, like anything.

So a craft beer will be brewed to its ABV what's that mean, alcoholic strength, So it'll be brewed to say, in the bolt to case five percent.

We packaged off and sent to the customer unfiltered, almost raw like raw milk, unpasteurized, has a hard shelf life and it's sort of deteriorates pretty quick, those type of beers.

But in the macro beer world, the Great Northerns and the Carton drafts and the Tuoi's and the four X is, what we do is we brew it at a higher ABV so we get more bang for our buck.

When we're brewing the beer, we pasteurize our product so it stay shelf table.

That basically means you're head up a bit.

Yeah, we heat it up a bit, just kill off the bacterias.

Kill off any chance of any bacteria, so you don't have product recalls the like.

But what we do with better beer is we use products like enzymes in there to break down more of the carbohydrates and our competitive set and that gives us our zero carb claim.

And so how did you learn all this stuff like.

How did I learn this stuff?

I mean, here's the.

Four three of you sitting down and you know, you're you know, they've they've got great platforms, the two boys, Matt Jack, great platforms.

You know, probably really interested in this.

You know, the curious guys there into business and they want to how it all works.

But then they never brewed a beer.

Okay, So you've got to find yourself.

And you're decided you're going to go on the macro side of things.

So that's your call, because this is your market strategy.

We're going to take on the big guys.

Let's put the name aside for a minute, and what have you got to find yourself?

You've got to find yourself brower Yep, some dude who can make it to it make beer?

Is that right?

Yep?

At scale?

So I think that's kind of an interesting story in itself.

So you know, the origins of like craft beer, I guess, And I don't want to be doing this craft beer versus macrober conversation too much because all annoy some people.

But the origins of craft year as you go out and you buy a bunch of stainless steel, a canning line, a bottling line, a keging line, build out your sales team and go to market that way.

As you probably found out in your journey, it's labor intensive, it's capital intensive, and it's hard to make any money out of it.

So what we thought was we knew the beer would be relatively big, so we went out and had to find sort of a brewer that could handle the volume.

So we went out to the Cassella family.

So John Cassella of Yellow Tale Wines, he's got one of the bigger breweries in Australia out on his property out at Griffith.

So we went and partnered with them and developed the product with them.

So because I remember now some of our stuff we used to get roude and bottled in China.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was big back in those early two seons.

Yeah, it was in the early two thousand periods.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think there's a few beers that still do that, but we yeah, we just we haven't even looked at doing that.

But yeah, it'd be challenging dealing with the Chinese.

At the moment, I would imagine we won't called Buddha beer, yeah, yeah, that was yours.

Yeah, remember that who was the celebrity designer.

Yeah, I can't remember so far back, but I remember it was.

A little bit remember Baron's memory, Yeah.

Baron's Yeah, it was a little green.

Butder still around, is it?

Yeah, I'm sure it's still around.

I'm sure.

Yeah.

We designed we said a lot into the US.

Actually it was Chinese restaurants like to because it was when good good went well with the Chinese food.

But like, so you so you go find yourself a brewer, and you found this family and Cassele is it.

Yeah, John Cassella from Yellow Tower.

So and and what do you tell them?

You told them this is my secret.

Yeah.

Now, we developed it ourselves.

So I started in year when I was sixteen.

Dad had a micro brewery down in Geelong.

So I went in there and learned a little bit of the ropes.

But I'm not a brewer by any sense, but I've got, like, you know, a bit of an idea how to do things.

So I've been involved in that beer space for a long time now.

So when we went out there, we briefed them in and say, hey, we want to make a beer like this.

We want it to have these attributes, which would be you know, zero sugar and zero carbohydrates.

You guys, can you develop it for us?

See you going into a food scientist.

Or a brewer, a brewer and then you go to the food scientist to work out, you know, the nutritional claims and how to actually get down to zero.

Right, the zero bit in your relationship to your beer anyway, the zero bit's pretty important because it sits with the brand.

Yeah.

So yeah, did the three of you sit down and say, how did you work out which market to attack relative to the beer attributes that you had to develop?

Yeah, so we knew that the whole better for you world was just about to swarm Australia post COVID.

Like in the USA, there was a product called Mick Calibultra and it went from maybe outside the top ten beer brands in the world up to number one.

Well and it's currently number one in the USA.

Still we saw the White Claw creze.

So everyone wanting you know, zero sugar, zero carbohydrates in when they get their alcohol delivery from.

So we were like, not everyone wants to just finish work on a Friday night and smash a pineapple seltzer or a mango something.

Some people just want to beer.

So if we can make a beer that similar to that, we think we can probably get the jump on maybe the industry storewarts that were probably asleep at the wheel with some of their products.

So we had a fi at a thesis that maybe pure Blonde would resurge back in Australia.

It had a huge you know, sure did.

Yeah, it was huge.

That's all I drank at one stage.

It was a great product.

We thought it might I thought it might have had a big chance of going back, kind of like Micallibultra And just with the timing with us, we sort of just slipped in before I guess anyone sort of started looking for better for you be is in.

Mass timing is always like that's a godsend if you can get it.

So then what comes from that is how you get good timing is you've got to be sniffing around all time.

So you're obviously a person interested in You're following the world, yeah, on everything.

When it comes to bit relentless and tiring, Yeah.

Yeah, you're.

But you're reading all the magazines.

You're reading what was being what's newest, latest, what's greatest, what's trending?

Traveling, drinking, taking photos, reading everything, trying to find something that is innovative that you can take to market and get to scale.

So in other words, you're looking for what I call the rising tide.

Where's the trend coming from?

And so the trend that you guys landed on.

Did you find the trend and you put it to the boys or did the boys sort of was it a.

So I put the Better for You beer to the boys and as soon as I heard that, they were all over it.

They were just like that, this is exactly what we should be doing.

But I had as part of I had an a sexist company that was invested in my innovation business, and as part of that, I have this innovation deck that I presented and yeah, it's a pretty good deck.

Like I didn't launch a lot of the products, but a lot of products that are succeeding the market in Australia at the moment we're in this deck.

And one of them in there was, yeah, let's create the next Better for You beer in Australia.

So okay, so we should talk about the brand, the name better Be, and maybe just a little bit about the branding, the way you image the branding before we get onto it.

He went, did they do with some of my damn movies in terms of going to market?

So let's talk about the name better for you?

But who came up with the name better beer?

Yeah, definitely not me.

So I came up with bests, so I wanted to do bests, and then Matt and Jack randomly had the word better beer.

So yeah, they won that easily.

It was a much better name.

There was a few risks around it.

It just calls it out.

So you just want that, like you want someone to know what your product is within one or two seconds.

Like you don't want people to have to go to the back and figure things out.

You just need them to look at it and go makes sense.

I know what I'm about to drink, So better beer just says it must be better for you.

So yeah, it was a challenging word.

So I think at the start we went, okay, let's go and trademark this, and our trademark lawyers said, no chance you'll ever get that word trademarked.

It took a couple of year where we ended up getting better Beer trademarked in twenty twenty four.

Wow, and it's funny.

I'm just looking at these cans here, you decide to go cans on bottles like.

We do bottles as well.

We did bottles out of necessity, first off?

Would you do so?

When we launched, we did cans because that's where we thought the market was going.

Because we sold out so quickly in that first sort of two or three months.

Standing up can supply chain takes a lot more time.

So what we did was we went and put the product in bottles because there was so much demand for it across Australia.

So we launched the bottles within three months of launching, essentially out of necessity just to keep the stock on the floor.

Were you constrained by any analysis in terms of just going back to the type of bee you've got a brew and maybe the branding and the story, the messaging, where you're constraining any in any respect in relation to the audience of the two boys?

So like what I mean by that, Nigga, Like, did you sort of say, well, that's our big opportunity obviously, and they've got heaps of followers, but they're all thirty five to twenty ers.

I like, that's what they're interested and they're interested in stuff that's better for you, or you're just thinking broadly.

More broadly, Yeah, we thought this beer had broad mass appeal.

You know, when we first started, it was Matt and Jack's audience every day of the week.

But since then we've just we've built out a distribution to call it one hundred percent of all independent Cole's and Dan's and BWS bottle shops, so it's now available everywhere, and the mix of customer is growing every day.

There are former hard drinkers, former four x drinkers coming across to Better Beer because they believe in the product Australian owned, Australia made, and it's a zero carbohydrate products.

So we are getting a lot of people from different demographics now and that's probably something over the next two years, we're going to really start dialing up what we do.

So we've got to where we are today built off the back of some great social media campaigns and retailer mechanics, but now we're sort of about to enter the world of you know, above the line marketing, TV, radio billboards and actually spends stuff.

It's expensive, but that's the way we get to the next stage growth.

We're you know, fourteen fifteen million leaders this year, which is unheard of as an independent brand in Australia.

And for us to get any bigger to twenty thirty million leaders, it takes time and it takes more money.

And we're lucky we've got like a core business sitting there that's making us a couple of dollars.

But yeah, it's time for us to sort of, you know, take our household awareness from about thirty percent up around sixty seventy percent the next two years through different mechanics.

We've just I'm not sure when this is going live, but we've just signed Travis Head's a better be a brand ambassador.

Good timing, great timing.

We've just got him.

We've got a few v supercar drivers and we're going to build out a bit of an ambassador program.

So yeah, hopefully we'll see more households in the coming years.

So when you decided in terms of the branding, I mean don't mean influence, but in terms of what the beer looks like in the colors and all sort of stuff.

It's interesting I was talking and if you meet Fanning recently, and he was telling me when they're doing the ball to be the first thing they want to do as a white can, and your can is not quite white but as closing off to white.

And then you've got a yellow orange yellow, two yellows.

I guess orange are black nearly Australian Aboriginal flag colors or very Australian anyway, particularly out back, and a white can.

You get explained to thinking about that, it was it just happened to be the way it works.

Yeah, it's funny.

That was a really good interview with the board short piece that Sterling did we make.

That's really interesting.

So yeah, I guess we ours probably isn't as scientific as that.

We sent the designer.

We sent the brief off to a bunch of designers.

We said we don't have the eighties retro sort of feel to Australiana.

So we sent design this off to design houses across Australia.

And then one guy in California that I'd work with before.

The one guy in California came back with this.

So wasn't Australian, it wasn't Astralian.

Guy from California.

That's cool yet, on.

How does that work?

Then?

So Nick has a work You sent it a design brief off to not half a dozen designers and they don't pay them and just say we're wins the jobs.

We paid most of them.

Yeah, we pay them for their time.

I think it's a bit harsh to say, hey, you design this, if you design this house, if you win, you get the content.

Might just have to pitch up a few ideas.

It would be good to do that.

Now we paid a lot of people.

Yeah, you pay, yes, and then and then they will pitch to you.

They will pitch and we just go that can print it out.

So what did you want to get?

What message you would you want to get out of this?

We just like the look of it so much.

The message We thought the word better be gives the message our trademark day for it gives you, like the time and place when you should be drinking it, which is almost any time.

Doesn't realized that day for it.

That's a realizing it is in it's trademark.

Yeahs.

Yeah.

The colors are great as it stands out, clean and simple, and that's what mix said.

Like you wanted a can, a white can in the fridge that popped.

Yeah, like you know, because everyone el's got something to different colored silver, understand.

Yeah, you just want to clean clean, clear message.

Yeah, that bolt can is amazing.

Let's just go back then to the question how you launch, because I mean, everybody loves to know how these things happen, particularly like you're you're you're going to big box companies, you know, because Dan Murphy's and they're all owned by the big organizations like war Worst and Coals and et cetera.

So you know these there are independent lia stores, but generally the big guys, you know, but the rest they're all owned by the big guys, the big box organizations.

And of course you're a commodity within those places.

But therefore you don't want to get commoditized with all the other beer brands.

And as I said earlier, you don't want to be stuck on the back.

You don't want people have to go ask for it.

You don't wan peo.

People don't want to ask for it.

You don't have to get they'll go and they go.

I was going to get a better bit, but I just saw Toois on special.

Fuck it, I'll buy it tooies.

You know.

Unfortunately, I love tooys, but you know, you don't have to crack at them.

But and then, and you've got to be able to price it, yes, because if you if you're going to buy yours and it's one hundred bucks a case and the next one is VB is you know eighty five?

Yeah, you're cooked.

So pricing and positioning you have to.

You said you did a deal with the damn movies guys for example, why would they do a deal with you?

I mean everybody wants to do a deal with them, by what are you guys?

Yeah, So when we when we were coming up with the business strategy and go to market, I think you get a few different options.

You can go out there and sort of hand sell or do some smaller deals with different banner groups.

The problem with that is when you have like a celebrity partner involved, when they promote the product, it needs to be available.

So you can't just have it in Queensland and only or Victoria only.

We're going to get to the next states, Like you just lose momentum.

So we knew that we needed this to be found as far and as wide as we could.

So yeah, we pitched the dance and bwwas that Hey, you put this in all these stores.

We'll do all this great promotion and we think it'll go alright, So we pitched it to them.

They they knew that it was going to be a success from the start, so we signed an exclusive deal with them for the first three years of our business.

Why do they know that?

Is it because of the the Matt and.

Jack were big at that time.

Yeah, they knew the product.

Yeah, and they're still huge, and they knew that the product was the right product as well.

We weren't making it challenging for people to go back and repeat purchase.

And it was at the start of the whole better for You beer trend, which is now.

Yeah, did you have to sell it in like, you know, present stuff?

Yeah, we present stuff.

Yeah, how did you know the dudes?

Like, how'd you find that?

I've dealt with them for years?

So that was the advantage our sales director, he was formerly a dance a bit of us, so we all know.

And yeah, you know, it's not as big and daunting as maybe it was ten twenty years ago.

They are so good to deal with these days.

You know, their email addresses are on their website, you can email, you can talk to them.

So yeah, the pitch probably wasn't that daunting as opposed to some of the other products where if they don't don't range it, then we don't launch.

And would you walk in with Matt Jack, Yeah.

We walk in with Sorry, go back a step.

It was during COVID, so all through teams and right and stuff.

Yeah.

Were they in character or they.

They were in I think they had blue and purple hair and they were stuck in Queenstown.

So so they're in character.

In character because like out of character, they're pretty serious business guys.

Yeah.

I mean they're fun, but they're pretty serious business guys.

They're not fucking around.

They were some of their days, like you know, they're in business meetings all day, working in their next TV show, their travel coming arrival.

They spent a heap of time on better beer and yeah that they work really hard.

Yah.

Yeah, and most people don't know that.

Yeah.

So you launched it through Dan Murphy's and One Spirits.

So what happened?

Yeah, so the launch was a success.

We sold through three months worth of stock in a week.

Wow.

Yeah.

Well that can be a problem though in those environments because they say, well, we want to make sure don't you can't come in unless you can keep stocking.

Yeah, And it's funny like one of Our earlier ideas was to just do a fake out of stock and see what happens, because we think that would build the hype and demand.

But it happened naturally, so we had to blitz scale, like we had to just pull in all resources to try and get product around the country.

There was Reddit forums where better Beer is and people would be just hassling the staff and pretty much every bottle shop owner in Australia for better Beer.

Were lucky.

We had the Cassala guys who scaled Yellowtail from nothing in two thousand to one of the biggest wine brands in the world.

So we had that supply chain management team just supporting us and trying to help us get back into stock capital.

How'd you fund all this because these things can You've got to spend before you.

Yes, we're sort of lucky.

We just have good Yeah, it's all about terms.

So we've got good terms with all our supply So yeah, funding probably hasn't been one of our issues.

So we haven't raised capital or anything like that.

We haven't raised any capital.

No.

No, the whole thing's been bootstrapped by the three of you.

Your whole thing has been bootstrapped.

Yeah, so it's yeah, just favorable trading terms.

Yeah, what do you mean by that?

They just for those are listening.

Yeah, hopefully you're matching your sales or the sales are demovies get that they pay you, you're trying to match that with the cost of production to your production company.

Yeah, and there's distributors and different bibs and bobs in the middles.

But yeah, essentially that's how to do it.

Like if anyone, you know, any aspying entrepreneur, they or know that, like managing that working capital thing is probably something they don't think about before they go into business.

The next order, the next order when you get paid.

But yeah, we were pretty determined when we were when we're setting up the business, to set it up positive cash flow business.

Because like what can happen, particularly when you're dealing with the big box stores, is that they're saying, well, we pay in ninety days.

So you know, if someone goes in their store buys you beer paced immediately, but they say, we'll look at how much you're sold over the next month and we'll pay you in three months time.

But then the person who's brewing for you in your case or manufacturing, it's somebody else might.

So now we have to get paid every month.

Then you're stuffed, yes, because you're always two months behind.

And if you're growing, it's even stuff more because you're producing more all the time, like marginally more and more and more, so it's costing margin more and more, marginally more and more behind all the time.

So you guys managed to sort of match those two.

Yeah, it's probably one of the one of our business highlights is that we were able to do that from.

Day one, match those that's a massive strength.

It's been pretty good.

Yeah, not having a raised capital, not having raised debt, not having someone knocking on your door saying you are us this money.

Yeah, it's been good.

It's been so successful.

Where are at now, So, like, how many years you've been at it?

This is the fourth year, fourth year, So what do your sales look?

Great?

Yeah, they're pretty good.

So we just we do this promotion called Day four It Day, so it's pretty much our version of Black Friday, and we created it four years ago.

So last week we did roughly seventy thousand cartons a beer to customers, So like huge week last week.

We got the sales figures this morning, so I was pretty excited when I saw them.

So that was one of our top sort of three or four weeks we've ever had.

Yeah.

So this year, like most of our information is pretty public as well, so it's not like we're just talking off the cuff.

But this year we should be on track to do about fourteen million leaders of beer, about eighty three revenue in a bit of profit there too.

So where where do you go to from here?

I mean, I mean everybody in the beer game, all Liga games, they all think I want to do a Bolt, Maybe you want to do a Cooper's and just stay niche and we like not stay owned, you know, the big organizations.

What's his name?

Just hang on sick?

What's his name from?

Byron stone Wood Stonewood?

Yeah, stone and Wood sold, but he sold, I think he sold.

He kept one part.

He sold a couple of his pubs and well the family sold a couple of the pubs plus the Stone and Wood brand, and I think they kept one pub and I don't think they've got any interest in stone Wood anymore, that'd be right, So stone Wood great brand.

I remember when they first launched up there in Bangalo Bangalo Hotel.

Because I'm from up there and Walter again from up there, Mick Ginjel Joel.

Those guys sold all ends up in.

There's only one or two buyers these things.

It's too actually, and what does better be thinking?

I mean, if somebody's not going to do it yet.

Uh No, we're not at that stage.

But equity as in coming settlersts.

Can we get involved?

Yeah, it's interesting one.

No, we haven't really been at that.

We're still like trying to get the business the biggest possible.

So we've got like our own internal goals, like we want to be bigger than Stone and would sort of by the end of next year.

Wow, that's a that's a big it's a big call.

Yeah, so hopefully, Yeah, we're not.

Yeah, we're a huge retail brand.

So Stonewood was a product mix between fifty percent maybe six percent on premis forty percent retail.

Yeah, and no was tap onto tap, whereas we're at one hundred percent on retail.

So all of our volume comes through retail.

Can you get them any pubs like on tap?

Yeah, So we we haven't got a focus on that at the moment.

So we know that we are really good at our retail business.

But our on premise and on trade business.

They're just tap contracts galore out there.

It's really hard to navigate around the Osaki and the Kiran tap contracts.

Yeah, because they go into the pubs, they put all the taps and all the lines in and then they put their own busy so they pay for.

It, and they pay for it, and then they won't let other product stall there.

But we're not complaining like we knew the industry before we got into it, like it's been happening for forever.

But if I go on to pub to buy a beer, that'll be in the fridge.

Yeah, we don't focus heavily on that side of the business.

So that side of the business probably something maybe for next summer we can push into.

It's about thirty percent of all beer consumes on premise or at pubs, so we've got a whole extra thirty percent that we can go and focus on.

But for the time being, what we've been doing is we finished an exclusivity deal with Dan's BWS two years ago, so we launched into all independent bottle shops, did Banner Group deals there, and then this summer we've just gone into Liquorland which is coals.

So we've been focusing on like nailing execution across those to call it three big banners and then yeah, next year we can go back and have a crack at on premise, get some tap accounts.

But yeah, on premise is very challenging.

And how because you know what they did at Bolt and probably more importantly what they did at stone Wood is actually in board pubs owned pubs, the Stonewood family, they own pubs, especially up northern New South Wales, and they lay three or four of them.

Yeah, and I think there is that strategy as well where you can own pubs and do on premise roll out strategy like that.

But yeah, like for the time being, we just think that there's still a huge amount of headroom for us in the retail.

We like people drinking this at barbecues and drinking it at home and going to parties and drinking the product.

Yeah, down the track we'll have a pretty strong on premier strategy.

So apart from just growing the business, you guys got any aspirations you're going to put out another like a you know, another version of a bit of beer, like I don't know, like a stronger beer or a weaker beer or whatever.

Yeah, so we like to kind of try and disrupt categories, and we think, you know, alcohol consumption in Australia is declining.

It's weird, it's true, it's true.

Apparently it's true.

I'm involved in the wine business and I can see you now wine consumption is declining.

Yeah, so it's declining.

And I think everyone was hoping that, you know, the beer drinkers, we're just go into non alcoholic beers and drink them at home during the week, but it probably just hasn't picked up enough people leaving the category.

So we're sort of going back into light beer.

We're going to go and create well, we've launched last week.

Really what's called it's called halfy half.

Yeah.

We think that the word light beer sort of has connotations to it, like it's probably not that appealing.

Yeah, you know, I don't want to say I'm drinking a light beer.

No one does.

So what we're doing is we're going to just recreate, try and recreate our side of category and just call it half.

It's just half strength of our normal beer, so you know, you still get that refreshment and that sort of alcohol buzz from it.

But you can drink a few more of them.

Yeah, it's interesting.

It was funny years ago when I was younger, when I was when I was around your age, when I was out of the pub, my mates to drinking schooners and stuff, and I should drink a seven and a seven hours beer.

And the reason I drank that is because it was less.

I could drink one seven to one of their schooners, but it didn't mean I could keep drinking one on one to one.

But I was drinking like a half amount of their volume.

Not not for weight or any of it, just trying to be less pissed.

Yeah, basically wants to do that.

I'm the same like it.

But I wouldn't have drank a light No, a light beer.

They're sort of bit old fashions.

So yeah, we're just trying to get rid of the word light and it's just a halfy.

Like for me having say six beers on a Friday night of full strength, I wake up the next morning pretty shattered, tired.

I feel like dogshit.

Even mid strength you sort of feel that you've had that mid strength drink.

So I don't know the word mid anyway, You don't, no, no, no, no, mid sounds like underperforming average.

It's just it's got a new meeting these days.

But no, everyone says, I don't want to be performing mid.

Yeah yeah, so I read a mid strength is not a good word.

Okay, all right, take that.

I like halfy there, yeah, halfy halfy for the light beer.

So yeah, we're excited for that.

We've got some pre weird marketing that will hit the market in the next sort of week for that, which will yeah, hopefully go Okay.

So what is it?

Is it half one of those?

It's half one of those, yes, half our full strength vieer.

So it was like two point one.

Two point so that's that's four point two.

It makes it easier for people to understand.

So you know, if you have three full strength beers and that's sort of the level of alcohol you want to consume, you can have six half.

Beers and yeah, okay, so in terms of the half I just sort of will you go out and get yourself let's call it an international sponsor for that, like someone who's who's like a big influencer.

Yeah.

So we've got a little commercial that we've got going.

We've got a couple like, yeah, pretty good celebrities in there promoting a half.

Ye, so if you think what a half?

Yeah, when's that launching in two weeks?

Two weeks around Christmas time?

Yeah, right on Christmas time.

Yeah, it will be the week of Christmas, all week of Christmas.

So yeah, we think we've got something pretty funny to launch with that with.

But yeah, cans cans.

Yeah, so yeah, that's that's cool.

And and the boys, they they're going to be pushing it on their don't push it.

Yeah, they push everything that we sort of you know, our big bets, so like our day for a day, new products, or they do it weekly.

Sorry, do they do it weekly on their social media?

No?

Not really.

We probably don't want them to be doing that, Like we're a brand on our own.

We don't want them pushing it every day.

And they don't want to be doing like their audience inspired unemployed don't want to be getting hassled for beer ads every other day.

I was going to ask you, how do you reconcile that, like, yeah, because you're right, they don't.

People don't want to be getting ads pushed them all the time because they actually they're looking there for entertainment.

And that's what we do.

That's what's better be your pages for So if you want more better be you know, pushing, you go and follow that page and then the boys will do the big the big stuff.

And the boys will get onto the better be a page though as opposed to putting on their own pas.

So whatever feels natural.

We don't have like a set routine.

So if they that's an amazing piece of content that they created or the team created, they'll share it on their page.

What most people don't know, and I got a surprise, which is a pleasant surprize, is the two guys.

You think that they live together, which is crazy, but you think that they're just fucking around all the time.

But they're actually quite serious about their businesses.

I mean, they know, they know people what they're entertainment, and they entertain really well and naturally, by the way, it's not put on.

They're just funny buses, you know, and they're quirky and I sort of stuff.

But equally they are extremely curious about business, like asking questions all the time.

When I interviewed them, I've done a couple with them, but like, well if I just bump into them, they're really straight into me about what about this?

What about that?

What about this?

What about that?

They're not trying to entertain it or just fucking around.

It must be great for you to And then you guys all dovetailing within each other.

It is and like it is.

And then we have meetings like we had the other day where they got obsessed with that that six seven meme and they can't stop giggling and doing it on screen, like you know, thirteen year old kids.

So there there's a lot of that.

There's a lot of meetings that we get on and they have to turn the screen off because they start laughing in the middle of like a pitch or something like that.

So there is like a hell of a lot of fun in the business as well.

But yeah, we can do the seriously.

Well then you still get it.

Think they're young enough to get away with six seven.

I mean, but I have to say, Anthony Alberanizy doing it the other day was not good.

I get dude, yeah, give it away, give it away, give it away.

Well, man, I think this is fantastic because I actually been to the boys and I actually was really interested to talk to the co founder, the sort of the person behind the better beer who's running the business, and I now know why it's such a good business.

You know, you're very impressively on bloke and equally they've got great platforms.

So don't get me wrong, but you know your stuff and I really appreciate your time.

Thanks Ma being awesome, Thank you?

And should we do it?

Should we?

Am I allowed to do it?

Do you want me to?

Yeah?

Okay?

Do you want me to as well?

Yeah?

Fuck it, that's Christmas, let's do it.

Am I doing it?

No?

No, I'm doing it all right?

Yeah?

Yeah, yeah.

I got new shoes because I've.

Got like these well beaten in shoes.

That lose either brain new because I only want to put put anything in my mouth that just like literally I bore them yesterday.

Good nice thanks to the interview.

No worries about