Oral history interview with Aaron Gore, 2022

Erin Lawrimore: I am Erin Lawrimore, here with Aaron Gore, Senior Director of Business Development at Bevana. Today is Thursday, July 21st 2022. We are in Jackson Library at UNC Greensboro doing an interview for Well Crafted NC. So, to start, can you say and spell your name?

Aaron Gore: Yes. My name is Aaron Gore. That is A-A-R-O-N, last name is G-O-R-E, middle name is Michael Jordan. No, my parents don't watch basketball.

Erin Lawrimore: Wow. That's awesome.

Aaron Gore: Is it though?

Erin Lawrimore: Especially in North Carolina. Well.

Aaron Gore: No, wasn't originally from here.

Erin Lawrimore: That's true.

Aaron Gore: My dad is a minister, so it was the Archangel Michael and the Jordan River. And then Michael Jordan became famous the next year and they were like, "Oh, crap."

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah, then you were stuck with it.

Aaron Gore: Yeah. Stuck with it for the rest of my life. So, I managed to get a first name no one can spell until a Key & Peele skit, a middle name of the most 00:01:00famous basketball player of all time and a last name, which is a Vice-President, who invented the internet.

Erin Lawrimore: There you go.

Aaron Gore: I managed to go 0 for four on names.

Erin Lawrimore: There you go. So, you mentioned not being from North Carolina. Let's begin at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about where you're from and how we got to where we are today.

Aaron Gore: Yeah. First, I'm just going to provide a disclaimer for anybody watching this. I have a chest cold that I'm just getting over, so if I sound like I'm hacking my lungs up, it's not COVID. Tested twice. And if I do die on this table, I have video evidence. So, no. I was born in Kentucky, but I'm originally from Southern Indiana, but my dad joined the military when I was pretty young. So, I am presently on my 17th address in 34 years, so I have lived just about everywhere, including three years in Europe. So, gotten a chance to travel around quite a bit, but now been in the Carolinas for a few years now. Love it. Settled down. And I do not feel like dragging my daughters everywhere, so yeah, we're in it for the long haul.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. So, how did you first become interested in the craft beer industry?

Aaron Gore: Yeah, so I got into the craft beer... well, coming out of high school, wound up going into the IT industry while I was going to college and was doing enterprise change and release management for a Fortune 500 company. And when I got laid off from that position, they did a round of basically canceling contracts on contract workers. This was around 2008. I realized I just really hated office environments, which I'm sure absolutely nobody you've interviewed has said something similar. So, trying to figure out what my next steps are going to be. I was in my early 20s and talking to my girlfriend at that time, now my wife, and she said, "Well, what do you like?" Very complicated question when someone just lays it out like that. I said, "Well, I like beer." And she said, "Why don't you do that?" And I said, "Oh, yeah, that's a possibility." So, yeah, I got craft beer. I come from a family, nobody in my extended family 00:03:00really drinks at all. They're all from Southern Indiana, United Methodist. Alcohol is the devil. Love you, fam. But I had no real exposure to it at all growing up. And I was also a very picky eater growing up. So, as I entered my late teens and early 20s, I realized there was an entire world of flavors out there, entire world of experiences that I'd been completely shut out of. And so, it became a journey into discovering what was out there and in particular with beer, this was around the time beer was really, really gaining steam, nationally, really starting to diversify. And when I get into stuff, I like to get really into stuff, which usually leads me to going down the Wiki rabbit hole, learning everything there is to know about it and then I get completely bored with it. I throw it out and I never liked it in the first place. Beautiful thing about beer is there's so much to it that even after all these years, I've not even come close to scratching the surface or getting tired of it. So, I just made a natural outpouring for my obsessive compulsive love of just learning 00:04:00random, useless stuff.

Erin Lawrimore: Do you remember, was there one thing in particular that was the hook that you felt brought you in?

Aaron Gore: Yeah, yeah. So, the first time I had Innis & Gunn Original, so it's a barrel-aged Scotch ale actually from Scotland. Don't get me going on the history of Scotch ale. It's a made-up ale from America, at least since modern form. Nonetheless, spectacular beer and it was actually on my 21st birthday. We went out to a nice dinner at a restaurant called Spain in Rhode Island where I was living at that time. And I decided to splurge and ordered the most expensive beer on the menu. I think the bottle cost eight bucks, and the moment that touched my lips, I was just absolutely in love. I'd had some beer before that that I had really enjoyed, that I'd loved a lot, but the moment Innis & Gunn, all of a sudden I wanted to learn more and really start to explore. And that 00:05:00really just led to me getting more and more into it, first, the actual liquid itself and then realizing that there's so much behind just what's in the glass. And that's really what's kept me going years and years later.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. So, what was your first foray into the world of craft brewing as a profession?

Aaron Gore: Yeah, so when I first got started, I started working for a Finch beer company out of Chicago. I was doing sales for them. Originally, got hired to do sales in Rhode Island, just running the Rhode Island market for them. It was originally intended to be a part-time gig, but it very quickly started taking more and more of my time and energy. Then I got handed Boston. Then I got handed the rest of Mass. Then I got handed Vermont and then New Hampshire and then Southern Maine and then Connecticut, New York, New Jersey. So, by the end of it, I was effectively running the Northeast, just selling beer at a time when 00:06:00selling beer in cans, especially 60-ounce cans was effectively unheard of in craft beer. It was almost an anathema unless you were CANarchy Oskar blues. So, it was interesting to be going around selling 60-ounce four-pack cans at a time when people were still associating cans in general with macro beer.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. And who were you primarily reaching out to then? Were you primarily working with... did you find that restaurants were jumping on or shops or?

Aaron Gore: Yeah. So, New England's a bit of a weird beast. Sam Adams been up there for forever. Pete's Wicked was up there forever. You've had brands like Wachusett Harpoon that are about as old school as you can possibly get when it comes to craft beer. Burlington is practically the original Asheville. Portland Maine has been a powerhouse for a long time, so people were a lot more receptive than you'd think. The bigger difficulty you had outside of some of the eccentricities of the Rhode Island scene, which is I could spin off a whole 00:07:00separate interview just talking about how deep literally, how deep the mob is intrinsically tied into the alcohol scene in Rhode Island, specifically. Outside of that though, the bigger issue you have is competing with some of those old hands, who have really got their hands deep into the industry for a long time. I used to tell people, you could go to the diviest dive bar in Massachusetts. They'd have saw dusts on the floor. You walk in, you hear the record skip and everybody looks at you. Some dude with an eye patch and I don't know, scar across his face is just like, "What are you doing here?" But they're going to have Bud Light and three varieties of Sam Adams. So, yeah, that was always the harder part to break into was just being able to sell into an area that already thought they had craft beer completely figured out.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah, that makes sense. So, how did you make your way here to North Carolina?

Aaron Gore: Oh, it was real simple. My wife had never lived anywhere other than 00:08:00new England and so, I told her I've been moving around my whole life. Pick a place, we'll go. Five years passes and then she said, "How about Charlotte?" And I said, "Sure." It was really about that simple, so we actually wound up selling our house when we were on honeymoon in Italy. Came down here with no jobs. Got an apartment site I had seen on the internet. Stupid, stupid. It was one of those things that wound up working incredibly well, but I do not recommend it. In retrospect, it was a terrible set of decisions. But her boss's husband was from Charlotte, had just spoken real highly of it. So, we had basically set up a trip down here to just explore. See if we really wanted to move down here, a trip we couldn't afford. We were living hand-to-mouth up in Massachusetts. One of the most expensive parts of the country. We were quite literally having to, hopefully, this doesn't incriminate me, steal from the self-checkouts at Stop & Shop to be able to eat. But took a trip down here and basically said, "If we 00:09:00like it, we have to go." Cost of living down here was 60% what it was where we were living. And the first day, we were bouncing around Charlotte and we were like, "Man, I'm not really sure that we're feeling this. This might have been a terrible mistake." And then we wound up going to Moo & Brew or actually the very first Moo & Brew Festival. Actually before that, we went to Olde Mecklenburg Brewery. Sat down at beer hall and this is a time where you were just starting to be able to have actual tap rooms in Massachusetts, Rhode Island. So, sitting down in a full-fledged beer garden was a very unique experience. Felt really fulfilling. It was really funny because I wound up moving out of New England, literally the year before Trillium and Treehouse blew everything open and now Massachusetts is a massive scene. I came to Charlotte to get to a better beer scene, ironically. But then we went from there to the first Moo & Brew festival. Met up with some folks. We wound up winning tickets to a checkers game. So, over the course of one day, we went to an amazing brewery that had an epic 00:10:00own-premise taproom experience. Had some fantastic food. Went to Moo & Brew, a really cool innovative festival that had a shaky history of sense, but that first one was great, I promise. Went to a checkers game. I think we even went to a Hornets game. We wound up hanging out with some people that we just met out of the blue. And after that, it was love, and yeah, just decided to make the choice and come on down.

Erin Lawrimore: And when was that?

Aaron Gore: This was about seven years ago. About seven years ago, yeah. So, it's seven.

Erin Lawrimore: So, the Charlotte beer scene has changed a lot since then.

Aaron Gore: Drastically. Oh, my God. Drastically, yeah. At that time, we must have had 20, 22 breweries, if we had that many. That'd probably even be stretching it. And now, we're up over 70 in the metro area, depending on where you want to draw the line on what constitutes Metro Charlotte.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. And Charlotte's become a place also for some of the other breweries to have their second or third shop. Yeah.

Aaron Gore: Apparently everybody is, yeah, yeah. Now, Hi-Wire just opened up last Friday, so I don't know when in the future you're watching this, but yeah, Chris's new place is right in south in there. They got a really nice spot. They're doing a lot of really good stuff. Yeah, you got Weathered Souls coming in out of San Antonio. Marcus putting in his incubator there, which we're really excited about. Gilde came in from Hamburg, Germany. Yeah. It's been cool to watch all the investment area. Durty Bulls coming in. 4001 Yancey. Now, you got Southern Tier Victory that has been there for a few years now and just cleaned up metals at GABF. Did some really good stuff. So, it's been really cool to watch Charlotte go from being the biggest city no one has ever heard of to being a place that's getting quite a bit of recognition. Not just in the beer scene, but even nationally.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. So, once you got to Charlotte, what happened next? Where did you connect with the beer industry?

Aaron Gore: Yeah, so I spent a couple of months working at a dog daycare of all places, just while I was trying to find a job in the industry. And from there, I actually started doing sales in the Charlotte area for Big Boss Brewing. Out of Raleigh, they're one of the OG breweries in the state, at least as far as the more developed craft industry has been concerned, I think, they're a 2008 foundation. So, went to work for them. They were having a bit of a hard time with their wholesaler in the area and it was definitely some tough going. Wound up eventually splitting the territory. Rita Yarmey is now with Wicked Weed, who's just... I've got my own feelings on ABI, in general, but Rita is just one of the best people you'll ever meet and incredible at her job. So, that was an opportunity for me to take what I learned managing a very large territory and be able to really learn, in a lot of ways learn the hard way, about what it takes to manage North Carolina. Very different beer scene, very different set of laws, very different set of circumstances of attitudes and of development within craft 00:13:00beer, a draw by fire.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Were there specific things about that? You mentioned some of the differences that were especially surprising to you, for good or for bad surprising.

Aaron Gore: Yeah. My first beer festival where I realized you couldn't drink at the festival, if you're working. If you told somebody in Massachusetts or Rhode Island, you cannot drink at a festival, you'd get kicked out of the freaking festival. I don't care if you were hosting it. That blew my mind. That is such a cultural faux pas in most of the country and even if you cross the border down to South Carolina, where you have to have volunteers pour for you. If you tell people they can't drink at the festival while they're working, it's like, "What the heck? What are you on?" Aside from that, the taprooms were already off to a really good start down here. I think in some ways, having the development of craft beer coming a little later, being delayed a bit compared to the Colorados, the Californias, the Massachusetts of the world, actually wound up setting up an environment where they could start fresh. Actually, Thomas Creek across the 00:14:00board is actually a really good example. Thomas Creek has a famously bad taproom and it's not even their fault. They had to be set up in a place before South Carolina allowed taprooms. So, they are in and out in the middle of nowhere, industrial complex that's really tucked way back there and it's not comfortable. It's not a fun place to drink. It's not their fault. It's just they had to exist within the legal constraints at that time. Massachusetts has only in the last few years, has really been prioritizing getting some of those taprooms alike. Whereas North Carolina, because those taprooms got turned on as an option around the same time that craft beer became an option. It really made it a core part of the culture early on.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah, that makes sense. So, I know one thing you have done a good bit off is writing and podcasting. Writing about and thinking about and talking about North Carolina beer.

Aaron Gore: Yeah.

Erin Lawrimore: Can you talk a little bit about how you jumped into that? After you cough.

Aaron Gore: I told you I'm not. Yeah, so I've actually done writing for most of 00:15:00my life when my dad was at the War College, which will probably get me into trouble for me saying this. I actually did a lot of editing on the papers of students at Smith. He was actually a teacher at the Chaplain School. So yeah, I've been doing college level editing since I was 15. And I've been doing writing in some capacity other, essentially as long. I was always a pretty good writer. How I started doing it for the beer industry was literally is my wife, again, who pushes me to do all the best things in my life. She got tired of me ranting endlessly about stuff in the industry. And she said, "Listen, will you just start a blog or something or leave me the hell alone." So, that's literally how Liquid Assets, which was my first blog, got started and that was around the same time I started making more frequent podcast appearances, eventually starting my own podcast, Between the Pints with Ryan. My partner, Ryan Moses, 00:16:00down in the Charlotte area. We had that going about a couple of years before we both had kids and just life got in the way. But yeah, no, I got into writing there and have just kept doing it over the years. The hardest part is just finding the time now, but I've done national writing for Porch Drinking. I was a writer for Beer Charlotte, lead writer there for the entirety of at least the back half of its existence. I've done some writing and submissions works for other publications around the industry, including Carolina Brew Scene, so yeah. I enjoyed that aspect of it, podcast, especially, as an opportunity for me to do exactly what I'm doing now, which is talk about myself. I'm my favorite subject. And I like to think I'm pretty good at running my mouth, so yeah.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. So, with the writing, when you were doing that work, how did you see the beer writing community interacting with the brewing community here in North Carolina? Was there a divide or was there a lot of blurring of 00:17:00lines there?

Aaron Gore: In general, there's a pretty stark divide. Here in North America, we have the North American Guild of Beer Writers, which is largely headed, at least in administrative capacity, by Brian Roth, who's based here in the States. Writes for Good Beer Hunting. He's their Sightlines editor and one of the smartest people I know. So, there's definitely a class of beer writer and there's a class of people within the industry. And it's not that never twain shall meet, but they definitely approach it from different angles. So, the writing community, I think one of the things that they're very, very good at is being outside of the brewing community. Anytime you have an industry that's very, very culturally driven that can be a wonderful thing, but it also creates all of these traditions and cultural artifact. And this inertia of thought that can really make it difficult to be honest with yourselves in analysis, in exposé, and really confronting some of what's happening within the industry. 00:18:00And I think having a separate independent journalistic arm of the industry has done a great job of being able to shed light on some of those things, both positive and negative, and really force us to look at things in a different way. Downsides is, so I was a professional wrestler for years. I know we talked about that before we hopped on camera. This is how the magic happens, guys. In the professional wrestling world, you have a very similar divide where you get a lot of die-hard fans or writers about the wrestling industry. And there's a term we have for them, it's marks. It's people who are really, really into it to the point they think they're part of it and they might even be adjacent to it and supporting it. You need them. They're important. You respect them, but they don't have the lived experience of being in it and that can sometimes lead to not fully understanding the context and circumstances that some of the decisions get made or some of the way things actually work on the inside. So, it can lead to some of the same writing that benefits from being independent and being 00:19:00outside of the industry, also not necessarily reflecting the culture and some of those artifacts from within the industry.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah, no, that makes sense. But I'm also wondering how that connects over because I know you've done a lot of consulting work within the industry, too. And so, talk a little bit about that consulting work that you've done and maybe even how that was informed by experiences.

Aaron Gore: Yeah, so huge part of what my second part of my career has been about, including my current full-time role. But it's been about realizing that when I got into this industry and this has continued to be the case, there is not a great body of institutional knowledge and not a great body of actual best practices. So much of the knowledge is folk wisdom. It's all folk knowledge. I didn't know how to do this, so I asked the brewery up the street, who they only found out how to do it by asking the brewery that was there before them. And at 00:20:00that point, a lot of times, the only reason everybody is doing it a certain way is because that first brewery in town had had to figure it out on their own and they probably just made it up or did what worked at that time. It's not necessarily an attitude towards best practice and attitude towards continual improvement and some of these things will ossify and that creates stagnation in the industry. We're at a point now where the industry is maturing extremely rapidly and we have to be able to up our games because it's very easy to forget. As much as we love this, and we love beer and we love the culture, we love the community, you can make great beer and stay a home brewer. You start a craft brewery to sell great beer and that means that we have a lot to learn from other industries. There's a lot we can learn from the big macro breweries as long as we make sure we don't throw away the things that we do better or that are core to our mission and our purpose. And so, consulting for me was a way of trying to do my part in not forcing so much as guiding and coaching along some of that 00:21:00more objective knowledge and professional knowledge. So, these businesses can run the way they should be run as businesses that are headed by passionate community-oriented, artists and focused people, rather than what they often wind up being, which is glorified hobbies.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Where do you see or do you see, I should say, education of the consumer side fitting into that?

Aaron Gore: Yeah, I think we've not done a great job of that as an industry. I think we did a great/fantastic job of getting over the first hump. Your beer is bad. Drink better beer. We did great at that. I think most people are on board for that. Here's the problem. If all we needed was just strictly better beer, you can do that with four firms. That isn't the core problem we're solving. What we have to do is be able to continue the messaging and that comes in a couple 00:22:00ways. Part of it is making the message and making the appeal that small breweries do a lot of things, a lot better. We're gloriously inefficient. That means that we employ more people to make the same amount of beer. We're tighter into our communities. We're able to more directly address the concerns and the needs of our communities while making better beer. But even within just the liquid itself and just the beer itself, I think we're... I'm a cicerone. I'm waiting on finally taking the tasting portion of the advanced cicerone. I passed my written and you guys haven't had an opening in six months for the tasting portion. But I'm certified cider as well. But I think a lot of times we can get too in our heads about proper style guidelines, which I think can be important for us as intellectuals of the industry to be able to have a common language and discussion. But as far as customers are concerned, that stuff matters less and we have to be able to communicate what the functional benefits are. There's a 00:23:00guy named David Gluckman. He was a Head of Innovation for Diageo, the makers of Guinness and half the freaking beverages on earth. He's a crazy dude from South Africa. He spent most of his career in Ireland. He's 80 years old now. If you're ever looking for a fantastic book, That Shit Will Never Sell is his basically memorandum and it's stellar. He's a guy who created Baileys, Tanqueray Ten, a whole bunch of stuff. But he's got a whole long diatribe he's done a few times about how beer has done a terrible job of telling you exactly what you need to know. What does this taste like? Why is it better than anybody else? Because we get so high on our horses with, "If I say it's a Kölsch, you know exactly what that is." And it's like, "No, what they need to know is that it's fizzy, yellow and really easy to drink. That's it." They don't care about the history of beer in Köln, Germany and stangen glasses and the fact that it's a lager ale. None of that matters to them. That doesn't mean you can't use the word, Kölsch. It just means that instead of just saying Kölsch, you're assuming that that 00:24:00carries some invisible weight. You need to be able to communicate to the customer what they actually need to know, because frankly, they have better things to do than memorizing BJCP guidelines. They might be that into music or they might be that in movies. They might be that into, I don't know, Pokemon, but they don't need to invest all their time into memorizing or learning stuff about beer to still participate in beer. And if we lose sight of that, then we're going to lose sight of that.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. That makes sense. And we're going to come back in a little bit...

Aaron Gore: I'm glad something makes sense.

Erin Lawrimore: ... to some of it.

Aaron Gore: I am glad. Yeah, it does make sense.

Erin Lawrimore: No, it makes perfect sense. We'll come back in a bit to the industrywide questions, but I also want to make sure that we get to talk a little bit about the company you're currently with.

Aaron Gore: Oh, no. They're the worst.

Erin Lawrimore: I know better than that because I've tried some of the beer.

Aaron Gore: Thank you. You were the first person actually to order from our eCommerce platform.

Erin Lawrimore: And we will be asking and we will be talking about that eCommerce platform in a bit.

Aaron Gore: Love it. All right.

Erin Lawrimore: So, talk a little bit about where Bevana started or because, I know it did not start as the company it did.

Aaron Gore: No, no, no. It did not start as Bevana in the world. No, we originally came out of D9 brewing company, which has been around for about seven years, eight years, 2014, however many years it's been. I don't know. I can't do Math. But it spun out of D9 brewing company with the real realization D9 at that time was one of the fastest growing breweries throughout the whole Southeast. Coming off a couple of GABF medals, World Beer Cup medal, so our program was really making a lot of waves. So, the question became, "How do you continue to grow?" Because one of the dark sides of this industry no one likes to talk about is that the financial side of this industry, the core assumptions of what makes up our industry are, for lack of better term, fucked. For example, we assume every brewery needs to own their own stainless. They need to have their own brew house, which is a huge problem because A, that's not how this industry is built. 00:26:00A lot of people have completely lost sight of the fact that for the first half of the craft beer industry, contract brewing in a lot of cases was the core driver of this industry. It was literally Miller Coors doing a whole campaign, talking about the fact that Sam Adams did not brew their own beer onsite at their own facility. That led to Sam Adams getting their own facility in the mid-90s. So it was, if anything, big beer forced us all into thinking we had to have our own facility. That's not the point. That's not the goal. And that's one of the chief reasons breweries go out of business. They either went too big, too small, too expensive, too cheap on their system. 65% of the total capacity in our industry is slacked, unused. So, what's the point of having all these empty freaking tanks. Capital is hard to come by. It's becoming harder to come by, by the day. It's very easy and misspent. Our margins are not great when you take everything that we have fixed cost-wise in account. Debt to equity ratios are through the roof, so it is. The question was, "How do you proceed forward and 00:27:00how do you continue to grow once you've capped out your own system?" Demand is there. Customers want it. How do you keep making more? So, you can go to a contract brewery, but the problem for contract breweries is they've got these huge tanks. They want to make your beer. The problem is for them, it's not economical unless they're making huge volumes, which for a lot of breweries, even if they're growing, they don't need that six months of product getting dropped at their door. It's a high risk proposition for these large firms, because they're dealing with all these tiny little breweries, who you never know if you're going to get paid. So, for them, they want cash up front. So, now, you got to drop six months of product cogs on six months of product. But now you have to warehouse and hope to God that you can sell before it goes out of code. So, contract brewing is not a great option either. And then for wholesalers, now, you are one tiny little firm and we're in a three-tier industry. It's very tightly controlled, even with self-distribution as an option. Self-distribution is incredibly inefficient if you go beyond your core market, so you have to work with wholesalers. And now, you're stuck in that position where you make up 0.02% 00:28:00of their whole book. They don't care about you because it takes one hour for your annual business planning meeting, just like it does for constellation. So, we needed to find more efficient ways that allowed us to consolidate economies of scale without throwing out the elements that small breweries do well, which is that community aspect. That is that outreach aspect. Taprooms are very, very well run when you're able to run them on that local level. It's product innovation. The next Hazy IPA is not going to come out of Sierra Nevada, even if they make a stellar one. It's going to come out of somebody who can afford to fuck around and find out because their stakes are so low. Brewed IPA was a trend that came and went like that, but that's not the point. The problem is that Kim Stewart event and Social Kitchen and Brewery out in San Francisco invented that style whole cloth and never saw really anything from it because by the time he was able to make any more than one barrel at a time, the big guys had already gotten to it. So, how do we leverage some of these economies of scale to make 00:29:00access to market easier, mass production easier? And scaling up great ideas easier without throwing the baby out with the bathwater and throwing out all the stuff that got us into this industry in the first place. So, that's where the idea that coalesced into Community Brewing Venture has wound up coming from. So, ask me why we're not Community Brewing Ventures anymore, because I know that's coming.

Erin Lawrimore: We will certainly be asking about that. You can go ahead through that. You all went through a rebranding process this year, correct or last year?

Aaron Gore: Yeah, in March. Yeah, yeah, that went live in March.

Erin Lawrimore: The day is blurred together in COVID times.

Aaron Gore: And the year is blurred together.

Erin Lawrimore: Talk a little bit about that. What led to that?

Aaron Gore: Yeah, so community brewing ventures was the first name for the company. And I'll freely lay the blame for everything about that name and logo on the feet of Andrew Durstewitz, Founder of D9 and Community Brewing Ventures. Because the name wasn't great, part of the issue is we always knew we needed to 00:30:00be more than just beer. This industry is going so fast. We're all beverage companies now and that's not a bad thing. A lot of people, they clutch their pearls and then ask, "Who moved my cheese?" But that's not a bad thing. That's a wonderful thing. Your average customer now is on bibulous. It's wonderful that people are drinking cross categories. But brewing wasn't necessarily given the right vibe. Venture sounded way too cold and it really wasn't what we were going for anyways and community was trademarked by a couple of companies. And our logo looked like something from a manufacturing firm in Detroit in 1983. So, it was all bad, start to finish. So, we knew we needed to rebrand as early as early 2021. I finally was able to start working on that in October last year and finished that out and launched it in March. That was where we pivoted to Bevana and really wanted to put the focus on a couple of areas. For one, get away from us trying to... we're not a brewery. We're more of a platform. We're more of a market access platform if we really want to dive into it. And yes, we brew some 00:31:00of our own beer. On a legal record, we are a brewery, a lot of things because we have to be the way that brand assignments and franchise laws are written. We have to be legally, but we're a lot more of a way of helping small breweries scale up that want to, and that have the means to. And have everything they need to expand beyond where they need to be and really helping them access the market. We also wanted a brand that was able to have a cohesive message. Something that is able to speak directly to people. And also, I wanted to remove some of the layers of baggage that come within this industry. I look exactly like everybody in this entire freaking industry. I'm a bearded white dude with hipster glasses and tattoos. I wear flannel all winter long. We wanted something that wasn't feminine. What we wanted was something that was able to be inclusive of everybody. And I think we did a good job of that with Bevana. I actually just 00:32:00had another company that we've been talking to called that out specifically and unprompted, which made me feel good because that was the goal. It was to create something that was going to be expansive and have kombucha drinkers and wine drinkers and beer drinkers and coffee drinkers all be able to see it. And say, you know what the most important thing is they're here for artisan beverage makers and they're here for people me who just to drink what I like to drink.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. So, you mentioned, let's talk about some of the companies that you do work with. Can we get some examples of, not just who you're working with, but how partnerships tend to develop?

Aaron Gore: Yeah, yeah. So, I'm in charge of all of our partnership, in addition to everything else other than brewing the beer. No one wants me be doing that. But yeah, so as far as the partners are concerned, we've got a fantastic group of partners right now that's growing quickly. We're taking a little bit of a break throughout the rest of this year and really focusing on our existing 00:33:00partnerships before kicking it back up next year. But one of the first ones that came on board was actually UpDog Kombucha. It's a Winston-Salem based company, women founded, Olivia Wolff, Lauren Miller. Lauren had to get out of owning a small business per doctor's order. She was having some medical problems, which I won't get any further into, but they needed to divest. And we were able to basically give them a path to sustain growth and still be able to keep this fantastic and growing company that they had on that path while allowing her to take a step back and spend some time on herself. And Olivia knew she wasn't going to be able to run it on her own, but she was still very much engaged and she still really wanted to be able to drive. She just knew she wasn't going to be able to run some of the admin stuff and distribution. It wasn't going to be feasible solo. So, bringing UpDog on board was awesome. It's been a privilege to be able to work with them. Their product is fantastic. It's less sugar and a lot 00:34:00less acidic than most of the kombuchas out there. So, it's a really fine product that stands out in the market and with great branding, which is exactly what we want. And to have engaged founders like Olivia, who are really going to go out there and hustle. And really, just be able to press flesh and tell everybody, "Hey, here's our story. Here's why this is important to us." That's way more important than anything we specifically at Bevana are doing. And it's been great for us just to play both sides of it. They're on pace to be our biggest brand with. And I think the next eight months, eeven over D9, which is what we grew out of. D9 is distributed in 14 states and UpDog is only distributed in three. So, it's been amazing to watch the explosive rise of that company and that partner. Bay Cannon Beer Company down in Tampa, they were the one that opened up right into the pandemic, which is not ideal. So, being able to work with them, I 00:35:00actually met them through Allie Grey, who at that time was their assistant brewer. She is now working elsewhere in the area. But I met her through Pink Boots Society as well as through the No More Pours podcast in the Florida that I co-host sometimes. And got to talking with Matthew Juaire and Joe Simmons, the founders there. And we've been fortunate enough to work with them on a close basis and really watch West Tampa develop and stabilize and grow. An area that's historically been forgotten about from a developmental standpoint. Companies like Bold Mariner out of Norfolk, Virginia. Founded by a couple of former Navy Seals, which they'll tell you, "There's no such thing as former Navy Seals." But Michael Stacks is a fantastic guy and they're finally starting to get some recognition for a long time. They're just another brewery, even though they're doing some stellar stuff. And a couple of key mentions from folks has really 00:36:00started to raise their star. And it's been fun to watch them really get recognized for spectacular stuff and spectacular place and just being great people doing great stuff.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. I'm going to ask this as if I don't already know the answer. Are there any unique challenges that come with partnering with breweries outside of North Carolina?

Aaron Gore: Oh, man. Do you mean specifically when it comes to bringing them into the North Carolina or?

Erin Lawrimore: When it comes to bringing them in and when it comes to pushing the beer out?

Aaron Gore: No, no. So, there are. There's always unique challenges and honestly, a lot of times the challenges are not the ones people would assume. So, the way our business works is a little different than it would be for a lot of companies. In the sense that on record, we are the producer of all the products that we put out, even though we pay out to the companies that are 00:37:00partners that we work with because that's what allows us to plug them into our distribution network. So, that lets us play some games with having multiple wholesalers, for example, in one area that wouldn't be possible for other companies. So, that lets us avoid some of the biggest headaches. Label approvals. I know people in North Carolina like to complain about them. They're a little bit of a headache, but I got to do Tennessee and it's nowhere near as bad as Tennessee or Pennsylvania or Virginia. Those are way worse. North Carolina, people who have been in the state for too long or have spent their entire time in the industry in the state complain all the time about our ABC, and don't get me wrong. There's plenty of common sense laws I think are still very much needed and there's still a lot of progress to be made. And I still think there's a lot of just absolute silliness that happens at the legislative and regulatory level. But in relative terms, we've got it pretty good compared to a lot of states. Yeah, so outside of that, I know there's a lot of talk of 00:38:00local. This is the part where I'm going to say some, it's probably going to be controversial among people watching this, but local is not nearly as important to customers as we think it is and even wholesalers think it's more important than it actually is. Local is a tiebreaker where the biggest issue we have at most places where people can buy craft beer is decision paralysis. For the average customer, they're walking up to a shelf that Harris Teeter has 250 freaking skews about. So, they're looking at this wall of just absolute choice and they have no idea how to make the decision. So, the first thing they usually do is they start in the local section because they have to narrow that somehow. It's like if you've got somebody who's never watched football in their life and they have no real attachment to any team and they pick a team based on the uniform. People will judge them for it, but let's be honest, they have to narrow it down somehow. That's just as valid as anything else. So, local becomes a 00:39:00tiebreaker. If you look at the numbers, even back this, it's not nearly as valuable to be local as people think it is. There's been some data that's come out that says after about 40 miles, the local effect drops off utterly, it's gone and it's modest at best. So, it's not that local is not important. That community orientation is important, but most of the good work that comes from local happens in the taproom, it doesn't happen in distribution. And most breweries aren't equipped for distribution anyways. Their branding is not universal enough. They absolutely lose their ass on packaging. People don't realize how expensive packaging product is. So, I dream of a world where a handful of breweries really make it their mission to set themselves up for distribution. And then work, whether it's with us, whether it's with somebody else, some model I've never even thought of before, to be able to specialize in entering distribution and we make our peace with the fact that most breweries 00:40:00will be best served by being community third places. And that's not only okay, that's the way that's probably the most true to our mission as an industry. It drives me insane for a lot of reasons anytime someone says we have too many breweries, 9500 or we're oversaturated. There's 11,000 wineries in the US and they have half our market share and 40% of that market share is imports. We can sustain 19,000 breweries if more of them are neighborhood focused, taproom focused breweries and that's a beautiful thing.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. So, you mentioned a few minutes ago that for legal reasons, Bevana also is a brewery.

Aaron Gore: Yes.

Erin Lawrimore: And I know you guys have a public space.

Aaron Gore: We do. So, I got five taprooms, I'm over.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Aaron Gore: Yes. So, we have three D9 locations, still one at Hendersonville, one in Cornelius, one in Uptown Charlotte, where Uptown Charlotte is only brewery, at least until Sycamore gets their place open soon, but I'm going to 00:41:00hold onto that superlative until then. We also have it's getting finally getting the sign changed over to be the Bevana Newton, which is up in Newton, North Carolina, just outside of Hickory. That's also our R&D facility, so that is where we do the initial spin up on some of these partners to make sure that we've got their recipes dialed in and nailed before we move them on up to co-packing partners across the country. So, one of the big things for us is we didn't want to be a big asset holding company. We knew that given what we do and the nature of our business, we had to be quick in our growth and we had to be agile. Assets are a great way to have growth. The problem is they're a very slow and high-risk way to have growth. So, with, again, 65% of the capacity US is slack, most of our production, we try to rush as quickly out of Newton as possible. Make sure we got the recipe nailed, make sure that we got channels for it. And then we work with co-packers that can make huge amounts of consistent 00:42:00high quality product and they're never going to be able to fill it up with their own stuff. Just the demand isn't there for heritage breweries that anymore. And it also decouples us from issues like, "Well, what if things suddenly decide to shift back to bottles?" It never will happen. I'm never doing freaking bottles. But theoretically, we could pivot to that with no issues because we don't have to sit there and look at our canning machine and say, "Well, crap, we guessed wrong." We have access to pasteurizers. We have access to alcohols. I can produce kombucha without having to do kombucha in a clean beer facility, which anybody who's doing kombucha in a clean beer facility is out of their freaking mind and everyone is scoping for a clean beer facility. So, it lets us decouple ourselves from the limitations of production, so that all we have to focus on is making sure that we have great stuff, partners who are engaged, that we are engaged, that we're doing right by them. And being able to find the channels for it, so that we're removing that big concern of, "Can we make this? And do we 00:43:00have to go either too big or too small?"

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. And so, with mention of the channels for distribution, we'll circle back around to the eCommerce platform and the launching of that. And some of the fun that went into that.

Aaron Gore: Yeah, fun, fun.

Erin Lawrimore: Yes. When did that happen and how did it come about?

Aaron Gore: Yeah. So, eCommerce was something that we've almost, since me and Andrew were first talking about this model, knew it was going to need to happen. It's just a natural outgrowth. Most people, I forget the exact... I won't misquote the survey. But there was just a survey that said the vast majority of customers would love to be able to buy craft beer online. Most of them also didn't know you could buy a craft beer online. So, literally, education has been a huge stopping point. The other issue is that the way laws are structured, most suppliers can only sell beer online and deliver it within their own state, if they can even do that. Now, this is the one big secret that I'm not going to 00:44:00tell anybody, but we've spent a lot of time and energy on the compliance side to make it, so that I can ship to 42 states. And that was huge because we needed to, just our in brick and mortar distribution. Just like in retail, the goal was to be able to make it, so we could help plug our partners into channels that otherwise they wouldn't be able to get into. eCommerce was the same. You can always go through it to Vor or Craftshack or Krappie Kings, and this is me throwing shade on them. What they do, they do well. The problem is they're going to have to negotiate absolutely ridiculous discounts. It's going to cost customers a lot. Their prices are ridiculous because a lot of times they either have to get those discounts from the brewery or they have to go through wholesale, which is going to raise the price dramatically. A lot of times their shipping is through the roof. I don't know why they can't get reasonable shipping, but sweet Jesus, they can't. Their service levels aren't great. Basically, it's a non-ideal situation. Its companies that were trying to find a 00:45:00solution, but that were trying to approach it from outside of the place where the problems were actually happening, which is at that supplier level. So, ECom lets us basically do all the things they're doing, but I can do it cheaper. I can do cheaper shipping. I can offer free shipping on all orders over $65 with the coupon code, find Bevana 22. So, the goal was to make it so that was better for the consumer. They're able to access the products they want, anywhere they're at, without the headache of trying to navigate all these non-ideal options. While for the suppliers being able to set them up to plug right into us and just get the stuff right out to customers and without having to face an impossible lobbying position at the state level and change laws. So, the issue is setting up an entire channel is hard, very hard. I'm not a web developer. The 00:46:00company we use for the backend that manage that act as our storefront. There's things like Shopify and that we had been working with one called VineSpring, which got bought out literally about four weeks before we went live. So, that was a bit of a rapid turnaround. We had some personnel internal things we had to work out with relation to eCommerce. We're having to build a whole new process, a whole new SOP, so we are basically creating something out of nothing, which is a whole new thing. That's not really been done in this industry yet from scratch, which at this point is ironically comfortable to me because that's what we had to do with Bevana in the first place. But, yes, seeing that go live was a hugely validating moment. We're still pushing on that. I liken running eCommerce store to being, you set up a clothing store, but it's like three streets off of 00:47:00the main road. And you can't have any signs and all you can have is nondescript mark door, so you got to be out there screaming, "Come on in," if you want anybody to even know you're there. That's really, that's always the challenge is you have to constantly, the cost of customer acquisition on eCommerce is notoriously high. Your average conversion rate is about 3 to 3.5%. So, it's a long road to ho, but it's been good so far. It's getting steamed so far. We have wonderful customers, Erin. And in the long run, I fully see a world where that's our main channel and everything else is supplementary to that. But yeah, right now, it's been good. It's been a huge lift and it's running and it's live and that's exciting for me.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. So, you've mentioned a few different, resources, organizations, groups, people who've plugged in and helped along the way. You 00:48:00mentioned Pink Boots, you mentioned some other things. Can you talk about some of the resource banks that you've drawn on to grow the business?

Aaron Gore: Yeah. So, every business is a people business, in the sense that every company is made up of people. And most businesses in a market economy, they're focused on selling to people. You have to be mindful of the fact that relationships are going to be a critical part of whatever business. I don't care if you're selling socks. It's always going to be a lot easier if you have the relationships and distribution channels and in a retail sector. And so, I've been very, very fortunate enough that if I have one skill and I'm pretty sure I only got one skill. But if I got one skill, networking is one of them, so that's been huge advantages that I know a whole lot of people who are a whole lot smarter than me. Being able to lean on some of those people, not just for their knowledge and their wisdom, but for connections, for recommendations, for just 00:49:00phone numbers. That's one of the hardest things is just finding out in a lot of business who to talk to and how to actually get through to them because if their inbox looks like my inbox, that thing is about this freaking long at any given time of unread messages. So, being able to leverage some of those networks has been hugely important. Krappie Beer professionals, a group on Facebook, that's been very valuable. Andrew Copeland who runs that is a fantastic guy. I know some people in the industry like to crap all over that group, but what they've done is lived their mandate very well, which has been to provide base level early day knowledge to people who are just breaking into this industry and have no idea which is up. I think he's done spectacular job there. And being able to plug into that network has been valuable. Being able to plug into guilds has been hugely valuable. Lisa and the NC Guild. I worked with guilds a lot over the course of years in a lot of states. And I'll go to bat saying that the North 00:50:00Carolina Guilds is probably the best run one east of Mississippi. New York has got a fantastic one. Pennsylvania has got a good one. Ohio has got a spectacular one. And a lot of great people, all of them. But yeah, Lisa and before her, Rich, that Guild has done a spectacular job. South Carolina Guild on the festival and the conference committees for the South Carolina Guild, they've been an excellent resource. So, being able to plug into those just to be able to get hooked up with affiliate members might have resources, suppliers. We got raw material needs, we got marketing needs. That's all been hugely valuable. And even knowing people like Warren Bondi, beer marketers or Julie Rhodes at Not Your Hobby Marketing, who I'm able to bounce ideas off of them. I'm in charge of our marketing team as well, so having that knowledge bank is important. And if there's one, I just met Joey who runs the San Diego Pink Boots Chapter and she also runs a merchandise company for the industry. So, being able to have those 00:51:00people that you're able to plug into. That's one thing that's amazing about beer is people are very free with their knowledge and they're not going to turf guard in a way a lot of industries will. And I don't think anybody in any industry and any aspect of life is building something from nothing. There's not an original idea of all time. Every song has inspiration from the songs before it. Every Elvis has as Chuck Berry. Every Chuck Berry has the classics and then the jazz and the gospel before that. You have to be able to build on the shoulders of those who came before and those who are around you. And I think we've been very, very fortunate enough to have a pretty extensive network there.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. So, one question that I accidentally forgot to ask that I should-

Aaron Gore: That's wonderful. I forgot to answer.

Erin Lawrimore: That I should have asked very early on, but you've answered it in bits and pieces. Talk about your responsibilities at Bevana. They are far reaching.

Aaron Gore: Oh, man. Yes, they are. Let's see here. I am the Senior Director of Business Development, which means I am in charge of all five of our taprooms in two states, across three brands. I'm in charge of our marketing team. I find all of our partners, manage all those partner relationships and responsible for all the payouts and reporting there. I work directly with our sales team, act as an effective dotted line management over JP on that side. John Pearlman, fantastic veteran of Avery Sierra Nevada. He's done some fantastic stuff for us. Let's see here. Over all the eCommerce stuff as well. Yeah, it keeps me moving. Basically, everything outside of the warehouse. Well, even the warehouse, if it's eCommerce is mine. Basically, everything outside of the warehouse and the brew house has got my stamp on it somewhere. And they don't let me be responsible for the bank 00:53:00account, which I wouldn't either. I don't even handle my home finances. My wife doesn't trust with that. I don't spend much, but I also don't, yeah. Don't trust me to balance the checkbook.

Erin Lawrimore: You already said-

Aaron Gore: I'm a data analyst.

Erin Lawrimore: Oh.

Aaron Gore: Yeah. I do most of our outside communications. All of our press releases and newsletter copy. Yeah, yeah.

Erin Lawrimore: You're going to remember more, too.

Aaron Gore: I'm sure I will. I am sure I will.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. So, if you had your way, where would you see Bevana? How would you see it growing in the next few years?

Aaron Gore: Yeah, so for us, I want us to get to a point where any partner who we talk to, who they've got branding that can live outside of... I don't know if you're familiar with what Yinzer is. So, Yinzer is a term out of Pittsburgh. 00:54:00It's their version of like y'alls, you ins. So people from Pittsburgh is called Yinzer. So, there's some Yinzer Brewing, they might be the most successful freaking brewery on earth when it comes to just Pittsburgh. But I can't transport them to Shreveport Louisiana and have them have success. But company that's got what it takes to succeed in distribution. They want to succeed in distribution and on eCommerce. And they've got the product quality that I know is going to be table stakes at least. I'd like to get us to the point where at that point, as long as we have faith in them, our wholesalers and our retail partners have faith in us. So, my big goal is to be able to basically, as we enter this period of consolidation in the industry, just wedge one hand on each side of a 10-ft. block at the grocery store and say, "Hey, this is for independent craft." And if we can hold this open and act as a facilitating forest to help stuff get there, that's the goal. I got two little girls at home. I'd like there to still be an industry when they're 21. My four-year-old can 00:55:00identify the pieces of a brew house. She's been to 76 breweries at age four. Her favorite place to go on earth is Replay Brewing. I have a video of her from a Hilton head trip. We were going to go to Lincoln in South Brewing and she passed out in the car while we were driving down there. And we were like, "Oh, we'll just get back to the hotel." When she woke up, she cried for 20 minutes, saying, "I wanted to go to the brewery." I got them on video. I'm going to hold that into her wedding day. Just embarrass the living hell out of her. But I've been in this industry a long time. Building Bevana will not be the last thing that I do, but it is an important thing to me. And I've always said, because I still do a ton of extracurricular stuff in this industry and even beyond Bevana, that I'd to leave this industry healthier and better off than when I came into it. So, obviously we're a business, obviously we're here to make money, but I think there's a way in which we can conscientious capitalism. We can make money in a 00:56:00way that not only makes the industry more sustainable and better able to survive some of the maturation shocks that are coming, but also be able to make it better along the way, so that I don't necessarily look like the most stereotypical beer brewery representative on earth.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Well, and you mentioned Weathered Souls coming in to Charlotte earlier. And that actually made me think of the role of incubators and the role they're playing across the state because that's not going to be, yeah.

Aaron Gore: Rocky Mountain has been doing some fantastic stuff for a long time. Celeste Beatty down there is a legend in the industry. So, there's a lot of institutional challenges, both that are endogenous and exogenous to the industry that make it difficult for people, whether it's people of color, women, the community to be able to really have their place in this industry above and beyond what the otherwise would be able to. We're not an incubator, we're more of an accelerator. We hit things in the next step up, but those incubators are 00:57:00so key to being able to provide those early resources that otherwise would be very difficult to access. A lot of people do not realize how difficult access to capital is for people of color, especially. The average Black household has only about 10% of the wealth of the average white household. Now, in real terms, real income that's not the case, but it's that level of wealth or real estate wealth or family wealth that makes it very difficult to easily source family and friend funding, which is how a lot of breweries start. So, for those incubators to be able to provide those early resources, get these companies off the ground. Let them learn what they're doing before they try to expand. And then for something, whether it's us or some other faculty service, us being able to plug companies right into our distribution channels, one of the things that allows us to do is cut through some of the, I don't mean politically conservative, but socially conservative, financially conservative inclinations of the wholesale and retail sectors because they're very focused on keeping their risk manageable. And on 00:58:00keeping the status quo steady because that's what keeps them in business, allows us to cut through some of that and give some of these companies opportunities, they otherwise wouldn't. That's even the wrong term. It's not giving them opportunities. It's us giving them stage moments to shine on their own. So, we need things like that to be able to provide a clean path to market, which is already difficult at any brewery. It's that much harder when you're facing all those headwinds. And that only exacerbates a problem that the industry has had basically since its inception.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. And that ties into the next question I was going to ask, which is specifically North Carolina focused. What are some of the biggest challenges that you see the industry dealing with today?

Aaron Gore: Yeah, so-

Erin Lawrimore: Either dealing with or not dealing with.

Aaron Gore: Yeah, yeah, no. Even a few years ago, I think North Carolina had some unique challenges, but now, I don't think it's so much unique challenges 00:59:00that as it is the ones that are facing the industry at large, I have been preaching for years that the industry has largely been... we've had a bit of an attitude that the good times are always going to continue and we're on a holy crusade that will never stop until there's an IPA in every hand and a taproom on every corner. The problem is any industry, the maturation is like respiration. You tend to see consolidation periods of fragmentation. We as an industry have basically been one long very successful period of fragmentation. We've created a long tail out of nothing to the point where average firms have been spiking a thousand plus a year over the last few years. The issue is we are heading into a consolidative phase and anybody who says otherwise is frankly stupid. It is happening. Anytime you see slowdown at the top, which is exactly what we have seen with the big two firms, basically, everybody other in constellation at the 01:00:00top. What that tends to lead to is a slow down among the largest firms of the long tails. So, the Sam Adamses, the Sierra Nevadas and that tends to lead to the more successful of those consolidating the less successful of those. Once that happens, that tends to just put off acquisition by the largest entities. That's why things like Monster acquiring CANachy, these are bellwethers. We've seen category blurring, so all of a sudden, soda companies for the first time ever are feeling very comfortable dipping their toes into beverage alcohol. I don't think most people have given any thought to how dramatic that's going to change the dynamic because Pepsi and Coke made Bud Miller look chunk change. The industry is going to mature very, very rapidly and a couple of things are going to happen. We can either find a way to let this long tail continue to survive and thrive in the gaps and eventually, you'll fall within the perverse gap 01:01:00created by consolidation. For every tide or all dish detergent, you got some tiny little boutique brand that is there for people who only want honeys into dish detergent that was made or laundry detergent that's made in the jungles of Brazil. That's fine. They're focused on staying small, hitting that 0.1% of customers who do care. We as a long tail can hold that open and live there for a long time, but if we don't do something to make that sustainable, we're going to see a massive consolidation from collapse and from firm failure in that long tail. That is, so for me, the biggest challenge that we have is we as an industry, we just need to wake up and grow up. And we need to acknowledge this is happening and figure out how to draw our lines on saying, "Hey, we deserve to live. We deserve to stay around." Customers want us, but market forces don't necessarily bear that out. How do we find a way of keeping the choice customers 01:02:00want and the community focused customers and communities need. Keeping all the things that are wonderful about being small and nimble while still acknowledging the threat and the fact that we're going to be working in a different ecosystem than we've ever had to survive in before.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. And that very much ties in, I think, with my next question, which was essentially, where would you see the industry as a whole in the next five years? It sounds like consolidation is-

Aaron Gore: Yeah. I see soda companies playing a pretty big role. They're not going to shift so much to where they take the leading role, but they're going to have the ability to pick their spots and take it and no one will be able to stop them. So, where they are comfortable exerting their weight, they're going to have a very definite role to the point where the Monsters and the Pepsis and the Cokes and the Dr. Peppers, Keurig Dr. Peppers and the Reed's ginger beers even 01:03:00of the world are going to have quite a bit of ability to play in the space, especially in the non-beer products. I see a lot of fragmentation happening in FMBs. Everybody is getting a little too self satisfied with seltzer flattening out. It really hasn't because if you consider spirits-based seltzers to be the same category as seltzer, then seltzer is still growing. It's only if you're restricted strictly to malt based and what you're seeing is product variation. You're finally seeing diversification in seltzer, so it's growing up. And now it's competing against itself because now the same thing is happening there has that craft beer forced on beer. You could argue that beer didn't grow at all. Beer actually declined their craft beer's life and it did if you're looking at the whole category. So, yeah, seltzer is flattening out, but it's because now all of a sudden people are like, "Hey, I'd like seltzer, but I also want to hit these ever increasingly fragmented narrow categories of it." So, I think you're going to see a lot more products selection that's going to resemble. If you go 01:04:00to Whole Foods and you look at their beverage shelf, their non-alcoholic beverage shelf, you have 50 varieties of freaking juice. You have these functional beverages that are so, that like, "This is the one that has activated charcoal and chia seeds that is intended for waking up and has Zuo tropics as well. It's like it's such a narrow customer they're serving, but that's what people want. They want that personalization that's baked into millennials and Gen Z. So, I think you're going to see every other category start to fragment a lot more like that, be able to serve more and more customers. But it's going to make it so much more difficult to put your stamp on a broad section of customers. So, I see there being the same number of breweries or an expanded number of breweries. I think they're going to have to get a lot smarter about not seeing their future being at the grocery store and instead seeing it on their own premise. And I think it's going to be a lot more of important for them to start putting their focus on the fact that we can be. There's an old adage in 01:05:00marketing, it's the law of category. If you can't be number one in your category, create a new category. We're going to need to get a lot more focused and we're going to need to say, "Hey, these are my customers." Whether that's just the people in this geographic zone and that's only who I'm serving or in distribution, having a really tightly focused product split and saying, "Hey, these are the customers I'm aiming for. If people are really interested in stouts, that's all we put out to market and that's all we're targeting." We're not trying to be everything to everybody because if you're everybody to everybody, you're nothing to nobody. And you already see some of that happening in places like Colorado, California. If you go to Denver, tell me that a Cass beer only English style brewery, Hogshead is going to survive anywhere else, but such a mature market. They know exactly who they're hitting. They know exactly who they're capturing and that's all they're aiming for and that's okay. Not everybody has to make every style a beer and I think that's, if anything, a 01:06:00beautiful thing.

Erin Lawrimore: Do you see some of that, I don't know, that that defragmentation coming to the breweries that are staying taproom only, or do you see more of... you talked about breweries that specializes in stout distribution. I think most taprooms you go to now, you're going to see a range of styles. Sometimes, it might just be six different IPAs, but-

Aaron Gore: Tell me how you really feel.

Erin Lawrimore: But you're going to see a range of styles. Do you see a lot of these places that are focused on distribution in their taproom, also following that trend? It seems like some of them, they try to be the beer place for everybody.

Aaron Gore: So, taprooms, I think have a little more flexibility because they're not focused on a category of consumer. They're focused on a category of geographic capture. So, you do need to have a little bit of everything for 01:07:00everybody because I've called it, the picky person principle in some of my talks that I give. It's the idea of if you got a group of seven folks and one of them only drinks wine and your brewery doesn't have a wine option, congratulations, you lost all seven people. You didn't just lose the one. So, I think for the taproom, it's one of the reasons why anybody who's trying to push a craft seltzer into the market is insane. Anybody who's trying to create a craft seltzer on their pilot system that's serving their taproom, that's fine, that that's fine. You need to have that option for them. Whether you're outsourcing that by bringing in a seltzer from a local wholesaler or you're producing it yourself. But distribution is a whole different beast because now, you don't have a captured consumer. You don't have somebody who's sitting there and they can only drink your product. Now, you're in the market and now you are competing for shelf space that hasn't increased in 10 years. And you're going to have to be competing for that very, very limited space with something that might not be 01:08:00your best effort, because maybe you're not the seltzer company. You make a fine seltzer, but it might not be hitting the seltzer consumer just as well as White Claw does or even just as well as the craft seltzer down the street is. So, it's important to find what you do best, lean on that in the market, even if in your taproom, you have options for everybody.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah that makes sense. So, thinking about North Carolina or maybe even the Southern region, are there any aspects that you see as unique regionally in this area with the beer industry?

Aaron Gore: It's funny, I actually had to answer this question yesterday. I was doing TV spot with Crafton. This is actually one of the questions. Yep, yes, in the sense that no. And by that I mean, we're in the midst right now of second great migration. Northern migration down South has been en masse and to the point where in Charlotte, at least, we call anybody who's born and raised in the 01:09:00city a unicorn because they're so freaking rare. They don't exist. I think something like only 45% of the population of Charlotte was even born in the Carolinas, much less in Charlotte proper. So, one of the things I think makes, and that's not strictly Carolina phenomenon, I see it in Florida. Florida is famously people from all over you increasingly see even places like Tennessee. So, I think one of the amazing things about the Southeast is the fact that you do get so many influences from so many different places that are really bringing their own unique take on it. And it's not that you're able to find each of these unique things. It's the fact that they're able to blend and blur and create something that does take some of the best elements. It's why we have some fantastic Hazy IPAs. We have some fantastic fruited sours, but we still have things everything Olde Hickory puts out. Fantastic Imperial Stouts. I think it's all these different lenses of being able to look at what beer and what the beer industry should be that we're able to really blend and bring together. And 01:10:00that's a really new thing. One of the things I would love to see more of is being able to take some of the things that are uniquely Southern. I think some of what we have lost and I think they're a huge part of that is because this industry is so white is there's a lot of the very uniquely Southern old, Southern elements that aren't getting added to that melting pot of concepts. Matter of fact, a lot of the breweries in the state were founded, most of them were founded by people from outside the state or at least were raised outside the state. So, I think we'd be a lot better off if we are able to provide a space and provide opportunity for the things that are kind Native Southern. Some of those concepts like the Black community in North Carolina, we have almost no representation among breweries in state. And that's already a problem 01:11:00inherently, but it also means that a lot of the influences that have been preserved for hundreds of years have really created Southern cuisine, Southern culture, the Southern way of looking at things. Those have been informed so much that even if we have white southerners having their voice and there we're still missing a whole half or plus of the conversation, that's a huge loss for really creating something unique and that feels regionally distinct.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. So now, we come to the question that's everyone's favorite question to go off on. So, let's talk about your favorite beer or beers from a North Carolina brewery. What are some of your favorites to go to?

Aaron Gore: Yeah. Gee, this is usually where I take things to private messages, so I don't piss anybody off. So, my favorite beer of all time is made in North Carolina. That's Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and I'm famous stand for that company. I think they're a model organization and a model brewery and they do make their core products in Mills River, not in Chico. So, you have Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, 01:12:00that's North Carolina. But if we're talking ones that are wholly innovated here, which I think is really what both the questions more driving at, the original IPA from Mike Karnowski up at Zebulon up in Weaverville. It's based on the original form, basically that IPAs would take, so barrel-aged, over long periods of time, huge hop rates. That is such a beautiful, complex, unique beer that wood, that oak comes through without being astringent, without being overpowering, but it just plays to create something so unique and so well-crafted that. It's one of my absolute favorite beers I've had of all time, much less just from North Carolina. Aside from that, Hop, Drop, 'n Roll from NoDa. I know people have slept on it over the last couple years. I get it. World Beer Cup win was 2014. It's been a few years, but that is perfect for an IPA. It's a perfect example of an IPA. It's just a fantastic stellar beer, but I really think the quality of beer in the state has just, it's been sky high. I 01:13:00think Charlotte is probably the most underrated beer city in the country. I think North Carolina is a vastly underrated beer state in general. Asheville took a few years where it felt they were resting on their laurels, but in the last four or five years, they've really gotten off to the races. Again, it's been awesome to watch some of the younger breweries there, like Zillicoah, like Dissolver. They're just really doing some really cool stuff like Sideways. And Raleigh has really started to find its own voice. Winston, Salem has got a great little scene up there, the triad in general. Wilmington has long been a hotbed, especially now getting some good recognition. So, it's been fun to watch the state really start to come together to the point where the State of Southern Beer is a very apt description. I think, you got the West Coast heavyweights and you got Pennsylvania and Colorado. But outside of that, I think we're sixth or 01:14:00seventh in the number of breweries. I'd say we're able to go to bat with pretty much any place other than California when it comes to general quality and general diversity. So, yeah, I think...

Erin Lawrimore: And we've also got folks from California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania.

Aaron Gore: Michigan, Upstate, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Erin Lawrimore: Moving in and opening breweries here in North Carolina.

Aaron Gore: I know more people from Ohio than I think. We used to live in Indiana and I still know more people from Ohio here than I think I did when I was in Indiana. So, it's wild, but it's been fun to watch. I think it's a great thing. And I think it's been able to act as a wonderful example for Virginia, which has a fantastic scene of its own and has really been coming into its own. Florida went from being a craft beer desert to being an amazing beer scene down there, almost overnight. South Carolina is finally starting to really develop on its own. Georgia is really finally starting to at least get some common sense legislation that will let those breweries thrive. It's Tennessee, where you at? 01:15:00There's some great breweries. Their legislative. I hate dealing with JABC. But it's been wonderful to watch the Southeast beer scene really develop into something worth watching win for a long time. It was definitely an area that was behind the times when it came to everything other than bourbon.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. So, that is my full list of questions. Is there anything you can think about that we have not talked about?

Aaron Gore: Go to shop.beavana.com and buy tons of stuff, have it shipped directly to your house in 42 states, plus the District of Columbia? No.

Erin Lawrimore: Lovingly packaged by the folks.

Aaron Gore: Lovingly packaged by the folks of Bevana. And if you hate me, we got a ton of other employees. So, please, I promise I'm not a representative. No, aside from that, I think we've covered a good bit of it. Go out to your local breweries, support them, support the industry. Drink what you like to drink. And 01:16:00just, let's be honest with ourselves about the good and the bad. We've still got a lot of room to grow a lot of room to develop. And please, God, let's stop saying that we're oversaturated for one, women and people of color, we've done an absolutely shit job of marketing, too, so when we have 60% of the population that we've done absolutely nothing to try and do outreach for, I do not want to hear that we have reached saturation. That's a slap in the face to everybody. So, I think we've got a lot of room to develop even within the state. And I think there's a whole lot of history still left to be written.

Erin Lawrimore: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Aaron Gore: Awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate you all.