Name: The U.K.’s Biggest Craft Beer Brewery is Coming to the U.S.
Uploaded: 2016-10-07
Duration: 4 min 41 s
Description: And you can own a piece of it

[ SOUND ] when we set up back in 2007, there wasn't much [ UNKNOWN ] seen in Europe at all. So we love the fantastic beers that we can taste from the US, and be able to get that full flavor, high octane, excitement beers, and in people's beer glasses and our side of the Atlantic. And your company is entirely crowd funded, so tell me about that. How did you decide to go that route? We were almost kind of forced into it. It was back in 2009, it was the recession, financial meltdown, we couldn't get any money from the bank, so we had to think outside the box. Any small business has to have access to capital, and usually where you get that capital from involves some duty or compromise. So you can deal with venture capitalists, you can sell to a parent company But we didn't want to do that. So we came up with what we dubbed Equity for Punks. We gambled our entire future on making it work, and we sold Equity steaks in our business online to the people who love our beers. Wow. And now, that is now possible here in the US thanks to the Jobs Act. We've had crowd funding forever, but Equity Crowd Funding is very new here. And you are about to test the waters here as well, is that right ?>> Yeah, we've actually just launched in the US. So, in the UK we've done it four times since 2009, and we've actually now got a community of 50, 000 investors. And how much is a share, how much are they investing in? In the UK the minimum investment was 95 pounds, in the US it's $ 95. Mm- hm. And do most people buy more than that or do most people buy one or two or? Average is between 4 and 500. Okay, wow. Now what are the, it seems to be this could be potentially very risk because you could open yourself up to having. Everyday people who don't know anything about the markets thinking I like beer. I'm going to pour a lot of money in that or any other company and people that maybe don't know about fundamentals or what to look for. What do you think about that? Well, what I like about how things have been done with the jobs act, everything is to be signed off by the SCC. Everything has to be audited. Everything has to be verified. So the fact there's that process in place, it's almost the same as any company going for IPO. There's those kind of protections in place for the investors, so which I think is really important. And they get benefits, right? They get discounts and freebies, what else do they get? Well if you invest in their company, you don't just own an equity stake in their business, you get a lifetime discount in all of our tap rooms and bars. You get a lifetime Discount on our online shop, you get invite to our annual meeting and the one in the UK used to have about 6, 000 people turning up. We do all the stuff we have to, but then it's just a big party with beer and music. They get exclusive beers and they get to be part of the journey. Usually, opportunities to invest in small fast run companies are Desire for individual investors or VCs, but this opportunity is open to anyone, and that's what the job act has enabled here in the States. So at 95 a share, if you drink enough beer, you could make that up in the discounts alone. [ LAUGH ] Exactly. An interesting way of thinking about it, is for every one of our beers you drink after you invest, you're getting a tiny bit Financially better off, which is an amazing way to justify having a beer. [ LAUGH ] That's a great way to drink beer. So how did you decide on Columbus? That's where, as you said, you're opening a big facility there. Yeah. Why Columbus? It's a bizarre story, but we decided to do something in the US. And I was visiting different cities. So I was in Asheville, I was in Richmond. And I was in Philly. Every time I landed, I would Tweet on my phone, hey, I'm in the city, where should I go for a beer? And when I did that in Columbus, Ohio my phone just exploded with people Tweeting me back. That's amazing, wow. So it felt like home. I was there for twelve hours and Of of that 12 year visit, I just decided that was where home was gonna be in the States. Wow, it was like an instant focus group almost. Yeah, exactly. What trends do we need to know about in the beer industry right now, or in terms of flavor, new technologies, new? I don't know, what do we need to know about? I think cans are going to become a bigger and bigger thing. When you look at the science behind it beer in can should be better than beer in bottles, it's lighter, it's better for the environment, it's easier to transport, it keeps out light, it keeps out oxygen. So in Columbus we If we had just gone with the canning line, we wouldn't be bottling the beers at all. Wow, that's interesting. Now, having been through what you've been through to get this far, you're obviously a successful entrepreneur. What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs who might have an idea just like you did? And looking to get it off the ground .>> I think you've got to never give up, and you've not got to listen to what anyone says to you. So when we launched Equity Punks for the first time in 2009 in the UK, no one had ever done anything like that before. We spoke to six different legal companies and they all told us what we were looking to do was impossible. But we kept on going. We spoke to seven, who said we could do it, but it would cost us £ 100 thousand. At that time, we had £ 30 thousand in our bank account, so we gambled our entire future in making this work. We've put everything on the line for what we've believed in, and we just kept going until we got that [ INAUDIBLE ] we needed.