THE GIST
Nashville-based Bearded Iris Brewing has announced it will join Atlanta’s Scofflaw Brewing in shared ownership under IndieBrew, a new brewery collective that Scofflaw launched in October. Similar to other umbrella groups that have teamed up breweries, like Artisanal Brewing Ventures and CANarchy Craft Brewery Collective, IndieBrew’s purpose is to consolidate specific business functions to give members a competitive advantage in areas of human resources, procuring ingredients, accounting, and sales teams. IndieBrew leadership says the group will add two or three additional breweries in 2022.
Bearded Iris CEO Kavon Togrye says any breweries that join the platform are expected to keep their founders in place. “We’re not interested in running someone else’s brewery. We are interested in upping the standards of all breweries involved,” Togrye says.
IndieBrew will be governed by a board of directors that includes representatives from all affiliated breweries, as well as independent members with no existing financial affiliations to those breweries.
WHY IT MATTERS
IndieBrew’s creation is a response to how economies of scale challenge small to midsize breweries. With rising costs for raw materials, a scarcity of aluminum cans, and an increasingly competitive marketplace, banding together allows smaller breweries to function as a business many times their scale. As costs rise for breweries across the country and businesses compete for the same materials and labor, this kind of move is no longer uncommon when trying to find an edge.
“There’s really only one way to gain that negotiating power and to get higher on the client list for a lot of these vendors and to safeguard our inputs, and that’s to grow in size,” Togrye says. “We think that that’s one of the benefits we can provide for craft brewers. We can give them a platform to really gain negotiating power back and safeguard or at least stabilize the pricing of their inputs compared to the rest of the market.”
Togrye envisions IndieBrew as a consortium of other breweries producing roughly 15,000 BBLs or more annually. Scofflaw produced 37,367 BBLs of beer in 2020, making it 62nd largest brewery in the country among those who reported data to the Brewers Association. Bearded Iris says it will produce about 17,000 BBLs in 2021, likely putting it around 150th. Togrye cites the desire many breweries of roughly this size have to professionalize certain core business functions—including accounting, human resources, and sales—which he says many brewery owners feel unequipped to address or unable to afford to improve. Sharing insights, expertise, and staffing power is an easy way to ease those worries.
As an example, Togrye mentions that Bearded Iris has never had a sales team. The brewery also has a goal of becoming fully carbon neutral, something that IndieBrew says it will be able to accomplish over “the next couple years” through changes to manufacturing as well carbon credit offsets. It’s a target he says would have been impossible to accomplish alone, but one that’s in reach with the rest of the IndieBrew’s resources.
The IndieBrew consortium is also a hedge against an increasingly competitive craft beer market that has still not fully rebounded to its pre-pandemic levels—the Brewers Association expects that recovery to show in 2022, taking three years to get back to “normal” growth. With a portfolio of brands, each with their own business strengths and beer style focuses, IndieBrew envisions itself as more resilient than any one brewery on its own.
“There’s general stability that comes along with being diversified,” Togrye says. “We’re not only dependent on Bearded Iris anymore.”
While IndieBrew will initially focus on uniting craft breweries, it will likely one day also include producers of non-beer beverages as well. Bearded Iris is currently working on launching a beyond-beer brand in the coming months, although Togrye wouldn’t elaborate on what category it would exist in. He says he’d potentially welcome non-beer brands into the IndieBrew fold as a further tool of diversification.
“We can provide a lot of value for beer buyers. It’s on the IndieBrew team to make sure that the breweries we bring on are differentiated, or at least appealing to different markets,” he says. “We really think that we can offer some value to the buyer, to at some point potentially offer them a full portfolio for their establishment.”
Words by Kate Bernot