Speaker 1: 0:09

All right, welcome back to the Vero Beach Podcast. We are right back here at the Walking Tree Brewery and today we're going to be talking about what the day-to-day looks like running a brewery. I'm just going to hand it right over to you guys.

Speaker 2: 0:21

So it starts with a lot of coffee, yeah. And ends with a lot of beer.

Speaker 3: 0:26

Not always. It's fun, you know we are. We are closed on Mondays. Now we were open seven days a week for our first eight years. This is much nicer.

Speaker 3: 0:36

I mean, my week normally starts with a brewers meeting, going through what we're going to brew this week, what beers need to be moved, package construction projects, maintenance projects. We do the majority of our own maintenance around here because this facility is giant, it's falling apart because it's 80 years old and we're constantly doing stuff. So you know, my day normally starts off dealing with my staff, getting them up and running, making sure we're on pace for production and all the things we need to do moving beer around. And then you know we go into. You know we have a Monday meeting with myself, brooke, who runs our marketing and oversees events, and then Ashley, our bar manager, who oversees the tasting room. What events are coming up, what happened over the weekend? We have events here all the time. So there's just a never-ending slew of what is happening this week.

Speaker 3: 1:27

It's funny. People will ask me in the afternoons oh hey, what band's playing this week? And it's like Tuesday, and I'm like I don't know yet, but I'll go find out for you. My always answer is I know what's in all the tanks but I don't know what's going on in the tasting room. It's a lot to handle. We have 17 employees. We have a full-time sales guy on the road who is dealing with bars and restaurants and publics, and ABC, total Wine, independent liquor stores trying to get our beer in more and more places. From my side it's just kind of juggling all the cats. That is Walking Tree. It's a lot of moving parts with distribution and managing a you know, active bar and tasting room.

Speaker 2: 2:08

Well, my day starts with a lot of coffee. So you know, one of the goals of Walking Tree was to be primarily, first and foremost, a production brewery, so less about the tasting room and serving out of a tasting room for the primary source of moving product and more focused on being out in the world. So one of the things that we didn't realize when we opened this place is how imperative the tasting room aspect was going to be not only to the community social structure here in Vero but also to our business. So there was this entire slew of things we didn't know we were going to be doing, and that is maintaining a very heavy dance card of what is going on at Walking Tree, not just bands and music schedule.

Speaker 2: 3:00

But you finish an anniversary event and you're already thinking about next year, and we have, I want to say, unfortunately, because it really is our best party of the year, but it's gotten to the point where we keep raising the bar is our best party of the year, but it's gotten to the point where we keep raising the bar and I kind of say to myself Brooke, stop, you can't do this anymore. How do you do better than you did last year with our Halloween event, which is just massive every year. So you're constantly trying to evolve and because Mike and I can tend to be a bit grandiose in some of our lofty goals, like let's open a brewery we're constantly kind of pushing ourselves. So there's keeping the dance card filled. There's dealing with the marketing. There's dealing with a lot. You know, we have a retail store. We sell merchandise more than we ever thought we would.

Speaker 2: 3:46

So, maintaining a retail, you know merchandise line and an online presence. And then really what's most important to us is trying to dial in community outreach and being a good partner for community members. That kind of align with who we are at Walking Tree and the State Rooted Promise.

Speaker 3: 4:04

Yeah, that's a lot. Dealing with Florida law city municipalities, county is one of the things that I didn't think we would have to deal with as much. But I have the cell phone number of everybody on city council Right Like I'm at city council meetings not everyone, but most of them. You know Brooke ended up becoming the president of the Florida Brewers Guild to try to help change the laws in Florida. The laws in Florida when it's pertaining to malt beverage are archaic and kind of it's like the mob, it's stupid, it's really bad. So you know, we focus a lot of our time on changing legislation, changing city codes and county and how they operate, because there wasn't a brewery like this Orchid Island who closed during COVID had opened. But they were, you know, a little tiny one out on the beach. They had a little storefront right.

Speaker 3: 4:58

We're a big facility, we have 1.7 acres of land and we want to do a lot of stuff. So navigating the legalities of how we can do this is a major part of what we do. It's wild the things that we have to deal with. Um, I've become a plumber, electrician, I'm getting better at hvac, you know, uh, mechanic like pretty much if if it breaks we have to fix it. You know I can bring a contractor in to fix something, but it's going to cost me, you know, 800 bucks for someone to show up here. You learn how to do that because everything breaks all the time, and if we relied on outside contractors to fix all our problems, we would have gone out of business a long time ago.

Speaker 2: 5:39

And you had to learn to do them right because they're expensive mistake.

Speaker 1: 5:42

Mark Cuban even talked about that. He was talking to people about running a business and he said, when you first get started, no, you don't need to find someone to help you from marketing as an owner. You're going to figure out how do I, how do I market my business, because there's money that you don't need to spend. You can't just go and pay for all these contractors to come and handle everything for you. You have to get in there and you have to get your hands dirty. You have to learn how it works and do it, because it helps you support the business.

Speaker 4: 6:05

How much overall disruption are you seeing to the big producers like the Budweiser Miller? How much disruption are you seeing in their business how things are going because of craft brewers?

Speaker 3: 6:18

If you would have asked me that eight years ago, I would have said man, we're really making a dent. We're taking market share from the big brewers. We didn't Craft beer, I think. In Florida we're a 6% to 7% market share national. It's like low teens. 10 years ago, the brewers association the national brewer association said that by 2020, craft beer would be 20% of the market Not even close. They were wrong.

Speaker 3: 6:43

Yeah, um, craft beer has really hit a plateau over the last couple of years. Um, I think there's a handful of reasons why. Um, this is a luxury product. Um, you know, you're going to go out to a bar and spend $7 beers. You're going to go to Publix and buy a 12-pack of Miller Lite for $14. That's not as much of a luxury right? So, going out, a lot of the world's changed since COVID and people aren't going out drinking and listening to live music like they used to and listening to live music like they used to. So we've seen a shift in how people perceive craft beer and also their spending habits since 2020. And it has affected craft beer all over the country. There are more breweries closed last year than opened for the first time in like 18 years.

Speaker 2: 7:28

Wow, Well, and there's also the. You know, I guess the best way to kind of liken it is there's truffle French fries and then there's McDonald's French fries, and not to bring a branch name in, but pick your fast food, you know French fry that you like. Everyone's got one that they're like religiously, that's the fry, and we like the fry. They move millions and millions and millions of that French fry from that Right, and so that's what you've got is very different products.

Speaker 3: 7:58

Yeah, that makes sense We'll never take over the macro lager market as craft beer in general. It's just not going to happen. But what has happened over the years is it's become hyper-local. So our IPA in distribution does really well in the Treasure Coast. It does not outside of our market, Outside of our home market. Baby Cakes, our oatmeal chocolate stout is our best seller because there's not a lot of oatmeal chocolate stouts out in the market. There is a local IPA in every town and people like their local beer. They've been to the brewery, they go there all the time so they are tied to that place.

Speaker 1: 8:35

Let's talk about that for a second. What I so that obviously that means your goal really isn't to take out the the big dogs, because you're like that's not really. If your focus was trying to take out the big dogs, you probably you're never going to achieve it, you're just going to waste so much energy and yeah, someone would have done it already. Yeah, that's a great point. Great point. So for those listening, what, what would you say, makes a craft beer different from a commercial beer?

Speaker 3: 9:38

Flavor primarily. You know, my goal as a brewer is to make a drinkable, delicious beer that has enough flavor for the style that you you want to keep coming back. Macro lagers are made to be super light, super easy and as cheap as possible. I'm trying to make so many different styles. We have 23 different beers on right now that we make right and that's constantly moving from like. We have an Imperial Porter on, I have three different sours on. I have a handful of easy to drink lagers. I have a new Saison that's super delicious. You know we have our course, which is our core IPA. We have a hazy IPA, we have our oatmeal stout. So I'm trying to make a variety.

Speaker 3: 10:24

So I touch a lot of people and expose a lot of people to different things. One of the stories I tell all the time is when Brooke and I first met, she did not like beer. No, I don't like beer. So I gave her a beer from a brewery up in Georgia called Terrapin and it's called Moohoo Stout and it is a chocolate, it's a chocolate milk stout, so chocolatey, creamy, really delicious. You know stout, dark beer. And she loved it and I was like, cool, well, I'll make you one. So I made baby cakes, which is now our second bestseller.

Speaker 4: 10:59

I've had it. It is delicious. I had it at Kilton Mermaid.

Speaker 3: 11:03

Exposing people to all the styles that can be beer. There's hundreds of beer styles and I think that really sets apart craft is that I'm replicating styles from Germany and England and from all over the United States, and we're just the ability to bring a variety to. You know, the public is really what makes craft beer awesome.

Speaker 4: 11:27

That's what won me over to craft beer is sours. I had never had a sour until we moved to a place that had a brewery and then any kind of sour. I love them. They're so fresh and fruity and, living in Florida, refreshing, you know, delicious.

Speaker 3: 11:41

So absolutely, and that's a German style the base. So they're Berliner Weisses, which in Germany and Berlin they would make this light sour beer and they would put syrups in them. Um, and they do it at the bar right. So they'd make one base and then you'd have three or four syrups, like raspberry or woodruff or whatever they'd put in the beer. And then Jay Wakefield down in Miami started the fruited sour. He called it a Florida vice, and that's where people started pitching fruit into fermentation. And so we're actually making the beers with the fruit to begin with instead of syruping at the end, and we have three different ones on right now.

Speaker 2: 12:17

I think my version of what the difference is would be I'd love to say that your average consumer really cares first and foremost what's in the can. Ultimately, what's in the can is really important. You can lose a craft beverage consumer real quickly based off of what's in the can. Ultimately, what's in the can is really important. You you can lose a craft beverage consumer real quickly based off of what's in the can and maybe never get them back.

Speaker 1: 12:41

When you say what's in the can you mean like the ingredients?

Speaker 2: 12:43

The liquid right? Does it taste? Does it taste good? Does it bring me where I want? Is it the experience I wanted to have? Is it too much of an experience I can't handle? Was I ready for what I'm getting ready to taste? Because there's a whole gamut there, right Then? This is the difference between us and the job that we have to do here, as well as why we decided to do this. I think people want to connect with the experience.

Speaker 2: 13:08

I think that the brand resonate is important, that your brand resonates. I think that it's important that people want to belong. We want to belong to the consumer. I think they have. You have to. They have to want to belong to you. We want people to feel ownership of this space, like that's oh, that's my brand, oh, that's my brewery, oh, that's my flavor, oh, that's my IPA or my culture. It's theirs and it's visceral for them. And most of those people do actually have a really good palate and appreciation for what they're drinking and might be able to tell the difference between some that are very close, but most can't. And they know it's good, they know they like it. It might not be sure exactly why they like it, but they know that the brand is theirs, they feel like they belong to it, and that's what a local brewery does for a community of people.

Speaker 1: 14:11

And when you do. I think that's why you're selling so much merch, because it's like they want to wear it Like this is them, Like they're proud.

Speaker 2: 14:18

The stay rooted has. Mike and I were on a hike in Washington state, walking down a trail at Rainier. Yeah, and it was a switchback and we heard someone yell from the bottom of the mountain like stay rooted. And it was like that is just wild.

Speaker 3: 14:34

Yeah, they saw my shirt from a you know a couple of switchbacks down and I'm like, oh we've. We were in Vero not too long ago. We came to the brewery and I was like, awesome, we're the owners and they were like Whoa that's awesome.

Speaker 1: 14:46

You guys are doing some unique things too, cause I saw on your Instagram that you have yoga class.

Speaker 3: 14:51

So Samantha has been doing that class for a handful of years now and it's probably the largest yoga class in town. I mean, even yesterday I'd gotten here just before it ended and there was 50, 60 people in 90 degrees out here in the tasting room doing yoga every Sunday morning and during season in March there's easily a hundred 120 people here that show up for that class every Sunday morning.

Speaker 4: 15:18

It's wild A lot of smart aspects happening there because the donation base. But then also that it's warm already. You know most yoga studios have to like crank up the heat to get that hot yoga experience. You're already hot hot.

Speaker 1: 15:30

You're also like this place is becoming, even to those people doing the yoga, like this is their brewery, this is their place. Next episode I want to get into the uh, the rooted. I want to get into that because I know there's some stuff there about staying rooted, so we're gonna. We're gonna get into that. When we talk about vero, is there a process that you go through when you're trying to choose new flavors or anything like new types of new drinks? I guess mixes and sours and stuff.

Speaker 3: 15:53

Yeah, absolutely there. There's a process to it. Um, there's two sides of it. One I'm trying to come up with something that everybody will like and I'll sell tons of right. There is that side of it. The other side is that I want something. This is what I want to drink, so I'm going to make it, and if other people like it too, that's great. But that's not why I'm making it. I'm making it because I want to drink it, so I can just make my own beer. And that's the cool part about being owner brew master is that no one can tell me no like hey, my little red wagon yeah.

Speaker 3: 16:32

Right, like the other side, I am trying to find always trying to find that beer that people are going to be like that's delicious. I want four packs to go. When I see it in Publix, I'm going to take it home with me. Anywhere I find it on draft, I'm going to drink that while I'm out. That is, you know, the goal. I mean, we are a for-profit business, so how do you make the product that just drives sales? So there, there are both sides of that. The more fun side is I want to drink this, so I'm going to make it. The ultimate goal is to combine those two and find the thing that I really want to drink, and so does everybody else.

Speaker 1: 17:07

I did notice. I think you guys offer flights here too. Correct, absolutely so. If there's anybody that hasn't been like well, I don't really know what beer I would want to try- we can help you figure it out.

Speaker 3: 17:17

We can certainly help you figure it out and we have some pre-made ones that we're starting to do so like. Here's our core flight and we have a summer flight right now. That's the Sours and the Saison, so like light, fruity beers, great for summer, so you don't even have to pick, we can just make them for you that's awesome, that's awesome well, that wraps up episode two.

Speaker 1: 17:37

We're excited to get to episode three and talk about staying rooted and what that means to you guys and what the community of Vero Beach means to you. So with that, we'll catch you guys next time. Thanks for listening, neighbor.