Grand Canyon Brewery — Episode 12

Brand Junkies - Rethink Creative Group

In this episode, David sits down with Alex Phillips from Grand Canyon Brewery to discuss how they've created raging fans by embracing their local culture. Alex shares how they are more concerned with fostering deeper fandom rather than creating more fans across the US. They are trying to do that, by creating new beers, liquors, and locations to their area.

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Show Notes

David: Hey, hey, welcome to another episode of Brand Junkies. Today I sit down with Alexander Phillips the manager of Grand Canyon Brewing. Alexander gives us some really interesting insights, he actually goes by Alex in this podcast by the way, gives us some interesting insights into how they have taken their brewery to the next level by embodying the culture of their city and surrounding area. Yeah, Grand Canyon is in their name so it says a lot about their brand and I’m just going to tell you right now, what he talks about and the insights that he shares actually can help anyone who’s trying to distribute a product or service that really embodies that culture. Without further ado, Alex Phillips.

Welcome to another episode of Brand Junkies Podcast. Today I am joined by Alex Phillips of Grand Canyon Brewing. How are you doing today Alex?

Alex: Fantastic.

David: Awesome, awesome. Hey, thanks so much for joining me. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about Grand Canyon Brewing and what you guys are up to?

Alex: Well Grand Canyon Brewing Company started in August of 2007. I think back then we’d have been the 12th or 14th brewery in the state, maybe even lower than that as numbers. There’s over 90 now so we’ve have some pretty explosive growth in the state. As it stands now we’re third largest brewery in Arizona for production. We originally, the brewery was going to be named differently but John our fearless leader he … Since we were Williams to the town is Gateway to the Grand Canyon. He was like it would be so cool if we could just use that name. We checked and it was available so named the brewery Grand Canyon Brewing Company.

Before we were even open every business in Tucson and in Williams was like hey how do we buy your beer? Sight unseen, wanted to buy it and so it kind of … Our original plan was just to open up a small little brew pub in Williams, a little tap room, and just kind of do that. John owns a few other restaurants and properties and he just wanted, he was a huge fan for … Not was, is a huge of Four Peaks Brewery here in Arizona and that’s what kind of inspired it but then we got all this inundation for requests so we just kind of changed the game mid-format and decided to go into production which made our tap room very interesting for a while.

Since then I came onboard right at the end of 2012 with John or even like early 2012 we’d been talking about coming in just as Phoenix Representation Forum and that’s kind of how I started off. I just started selling beer in Phoenix Forum and then our director of sales at the time was, he’d been retired when he came aboard with the company and as we grew and we grew and we grew it just kind of became less hobby and more work for him so he just, time to pass the torch. I took over.

At the time, about that time is when breweries in Arizona started exploding and John wanted to try and find our identity beyond just selling beer in Williams. That’s kind of where I came aboard as sales director and right now we’re distributing to 2 states, Arizona obviously here and Nevada. We’ve been distributing in Nevada for over 4 years now. I signed an international distribution contract in the beginning of the year and we shipped our first batch of beer overseas to South Korea in April and then we’re also in the middle of a $5 million expansion where we’re moving from a 15 barrel brew house into a 40,000 square foot facility with a 40 barrel brew house and the ability to brew as much beer a day as we currently do a week.

As that comes online we’ll be able to, we have 9 countries pending orders for beer right now. We literally can’t make enough beer to send them. As we do that we’re headed into a distillery as well to launch in the new space. That’s a little bit about us and where we started and where we’re headed

David: Wow. You guys have grown pretty quickly and now you’ve got kind of incredible growth trajectory. That expansion of production is going to be a total game changer for you guys.

Alex: Yeah we were trying to build it a couple of years ago and some lawsuits and some other hang-ups kept us from doing it so we’ve actually been stagnated for about 2 and a half years for growth. We’ve growth over 20% each year which is good but also we’re not trying to redline our production or short our distributors as little possible is the goal. Like I said I can’t even produce beer to send overseas that they’re requesting. The trajectory of this expansion is great because then if we get it up by January I plan to have 4 new beers and cans by the end of 2018.

David: Wow, that’s an ambitious goal but it sounds like it’s one that you guys will certainly meet. That’s fantastic.

Alex: Yeah I like to work so I give myself as much of it as possible.

David: I understand Alex, I too am a like minded guy so yeah I can totally relate to that. Alex what has kind of been the key to your growth honestly because you’ve seen this massive, it’s almost been up into the right is what it sounds like for the most part, what do you feel like has been the one key to that success?

Alex: In the beginning it was definitely the name, there’s no doubt. John is always, I always call him King Midas because everything he touches turns to gold. At the beginning was the name and his great business acumen then it became time to kind of establish ourselves outside of the confines of Northern Arizona which, where we sell 70% of our product. We do very well in the northern region of the state and it became time to really focus on Tucson, Phoenix and branching our brand out and figuring out what we were going to do.

We thought about it, we tried a bunch of different things and … We didn’t try anything, we concepted a more bunch of ideas and at the end of the day I told John, I was like what I really want to do John is I really just want to make beers I like to drink and make clothes I want to wear and I think that’s what everyone should want to do. He’s like yeah, you’re right. That’s kind of, we have a hashtag or phrase, it’s Discover a Grand Canyon State of Mind and that’s kind of what that represents. It’s … The Grand Canyon is in our backyard, most people leave the brewery or most people who work for the brewery live in houses with either exposed woods or actual cabins. I know there’s a lot of outdoor themed breweries but we give away 20 seats down the 9 day Colorado rafting trip every 2 years. We try to be incredibly engaged with our audience.

I … All the calls, enquiries from the brewery they get emailed or come to me. The Discover a Grand Canyon State of Mind is basically going on drinking adventures with your buddies. We all drink beer because it tastes good, it’s fun but it’s also because it’s a social thing and instead of just sitting around and drinking we like to get outdoors and we made a beer just for drinking outdoors. It’s Grand Canyon Expedition Wheat, it’s a 4% wheat beer. That was kind of what that is about just Discover a Grand Canyon State of Mind. We love going out and I hike every Monday up Echo Canyon and I take … I hike with my buddy and we take 2 Wheats up to the top, we get to the top, we drink it, we chill, maybe take a few pictures and we hike back down.

That’s how we actually live. It’s not just for show, there’s not a lot to do in Williams, you hunt, you raft, you bike and we want to share that with as many people as possible. Me, myself, John, Josh [Wostilo 00:08:57] our head brewer, we all live these incredibly blessed lives that our job is fun. It’s hard work no doubt but it’s beer and it’s fun and even your competition are your friends so it feels almost irresponsible to not try to bring everyone in that fun and so that’s what we do. We want people to discover that state of mind where we’re just going outdoors and drinking and working hard and just having a blast man.

People really identify with it I guess, I mean people do. I don’t know if a lot or a bunch is the proper term but we have a pretty significant fan base and they love us and they write us messages on Facebook all the time and they love that outdoor aspect. It’s not for everybody but it doesn’t have to be, that’s craft beer.

David: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, there’s so much that you’ve said that I found … No, no, it was great because it was all fascinating to me. You kind of took over the reins from John to kind of steer the ship if you will is what it sounds like, is that accurate?

Alex: Yeah. John is our CEO, present owner and founder. Like I mentioned before he is … John is the definition of an entrepreneur man, he is in like 15 different industries with several other business and he’s always doing more, wanting more. One of John’s greatest strengths is he knows that he’s a good business man and he’s good at getting money and he hires people that know the industries that he’s doing business in to run them. Me and John still do … Me, John and Josh still discuss everything together but the branding and stuff for the most part just come right of my head over the last 4 years or so and it’s all just been kind of this …

Not even, I don’t want to say a revamping because it’s not the right word. Retooling of our brand because we haven’t changed anything or what we do, it just looks cleaner, it’s just more defined and more importantly we’ve discovered ways to engage our fan base and our audience in a way that is A, liquor law legal which is a super hard thing to get around when you want to do things for your fan base and you want to, you just want to give back and have fun at parties and stuff like that but you got to keep it legal. You don’t want to be enticing anybody or giving away a bunch of free product but we found ways to put events together and to put programming together and sweepstakes to really engage people and get them back out.

We’ve started sponsoring some ski shoots which is really fun and just really trying to get out there and engage a sector of I would say what’s considered the outdoor community that maybe isn’t outright identified with craft beer most of the time. Like mountain biking and hiking and some of those things really just are identified with craft beer and just inherently but we just went and did a fly fishing retreat and stuff like that where we were just doing that kind of stuff. Those are fun, great things to do too and I’d never done that. That’s it man, you just keep going and you keep trying to have these amazing fun adventures and we just try to pull as many people into them as we can because why not?

David: Yeah, that’s awesome. How did you know because for a lot of people that are in your position or that are an entrepreneur they would have a hard time going what I like should be the brand identity. The beer that I drink, the clothes that I want to wear, how did you … That really took some chutzpah on your part but how did you have confidence to know that that was going to resonate with people.

Alex: I guess I didn’t. Here’s the deal man, I honestly have never taken a job I was qualified to do just because I prefer to be challenged and I’ve known John since we were kids, since we were young and that’s kind of where we reconnected. He saw it in me, he was just telling me that he sees my passion for the brand just burns hard and I know it does, I’m dedicated to this brand and I think that that’s really what kind of made it work is that he just lets me go and do what I’m going to do but before we just start spending money and producing stuff me, him and Josh sit down and go over everything.

We have a similar mindset and we have an understanding of what our brand represents and what those, I don’t know if key words is like the right thing to say but just there are more descriptive grounds than others that we prefer to focus our brand identity. There are great ideas that I think are great, they get axed out because they don’t fit in that but that’s the thing, it’s like to be more clear we just went with it man. We just … Yeah, I guess there’s no real way to have had confidence in what we were doing other than John was confident in why ability and John’s brilliant so it just made me confident.

Then Josh he agrees and we all just, we never disagree. There’s rarely a project that’s scraped and there’s rarely … Because Josh is like I want some hoodies that are like this, I’m like that’s a hot idea, I’ll say let me work on it and then I’ll just go back and I’ll concept something and I’ll bring it back and I’ll be like what do you think of this? He’s like yeah but I wanted a hoodie that pulls over or something like that, I’m like okay. I’m not worried about what focus groups are telling me that gets sold the most in our tap room, you know what I mean? We need hoodies because it’s cold and we love Arizona and so we use a lot of Arizona colors and iconography in our branding. We have trail mapping on our cases, we use the flag in a lot of our stuff as well as in Arizona we have the Five C's so we try to do stuff with that.

If you’re not clear with what that is it’s just, in Arizona there’s … They call it the Five C's, it’s climate, cotton, cattle, copper and it’s embarrassing that I missed the 5th one. You know what I mean? Citrus that’s what it is because of all the citrus that we have here. We try to do stuff with that like we’re doing a lot of fruit experimental stuff this year and just yeah man.

I guess the … I’m not actually saying anything. The moment it all changed for us was we’d been brewing heritage style beers for years and we do it well and we are proud to do it and that’s … All of our core brands were always going to be heritage style but when Josh [Wostilo 00:16:22] came onboard with us from Hanger 24, he’s like we’re going to start doing some experimental stuff and dah, dah, dah, dah and we’re going to start doing some one off stuff, really trying to … For our fans we want to produce specialty beers and stuff like that so there’s a change especially in the market that demands it and I just said what do you like to drink? That was kind of it man.

David: That’s awesome.

Alex: He’s like I like drinking big hoppy beers and saisons and I was like then brew them, I don’t care. Yeah, he’s brewed a lot of incredible beers. He started his IPAs, we’ve started a double IPA seasonal program. We have our seasonals during the year, we have Shaggy Bock, Sacred Saguaro Lager, Pumpkin Springs and then Muddy. Then also each time one of those come out we have an IPA seasonal as well. It’s like Deep In The Green, [Six PM Shootout 00:17:26], [Warrior Poet 00:17:27] and [Cyanide Dream 00:17:28]. Then that’s mainly because Josh wants to brew IPAs and our seasonals already belong to our fan base pretty well.

It’s being received well, we did Deep In The Green this year and people liked it and we’re just about to release [Six PM Shootout 00:17:44]. It’s still just a process, we’re still learning, we’re still taking feedback from our customers and stuff like that and a huge part of brew what we want, wear what we want mentality comes from and as far as also still giving back to our fans and our customers that have been great to us and our neighbors. We have something called the Shotgun Series Program and it’s just these one off beers that we produce 6 to 8 times a year and we literally just use fan and employee recommendations as well as anything our retailer partners or distributors might be asking us for, for specialties. Then we just kind of put our own little flavor on it and put it out. Then that way we can also kind of respond to a little bit of market demand as well.

David: Yeah, that’s awesome. All right Alex, where do you see, you kind of talked about this a little bit with the expansion of your brewing capabilities and you’re going to have a bigger space, 40,000 square feet, 40 barrel brewing system, you’re going to start doing some distilling, you’re going to be hopefully in 7 more countries. Kind of where do you see this going over the next 2 to 3 years from now. Do you guys kind of have that kind of plan or is it kind of just that hey we’re going to keep just trying things, doing the things that we think feel right, sound right kind of collectively in the brain trust of the three of you. Kind of where do you see you guys going or is just kind of we’re just along for the ride?

Alex: No, 2 years of delayed construction gives you a lot of time to get wild. I’ve been trying to plan our future for a couple of years now. Ideally we’ll be done by December, January and online and brewing beer. Once that happens we got to wait a little while to bring the distillery online and get all that going. That’s where diving in to the additional hands go. I also am a firm believer that the local market is going to revive itself as far as craft beer come, markets are going to become more localized so I’m not really focusedon a lot of other states at the moment.

We’re fortunate enough to have a name like Grand Canyon so that definitely just draws the attention of some countries that want to bring that kind of stuff in. Hopefully it’ll resonate with them as far as taste goes and we’ll be able to continue to have a great international relationship. We already have one for the most part because we get tons of tourists, there’s a thousand tourists dropped off the train everyday and we’re right there. We get a lot of people from Germany and France and all over the world and even on our Facebook page a lot of the likes are just from every corner of the globe.

I’d really like to focus on building that relationship internationally and then once we’re online and we’re kind of through the spirit stuff we’re going to start building some satellite breweries or locations. I know that we’re looking at Tucson and Phoenix and Flagstaff to start. The spirits we’re going to do vodka, gin, rum off the bat, we’re going to do old hand crafted style bourbon so it might be a couple of years before we put out a large enough batch to be relevant. I did a tenure behind a bar so I’ve had some liquor ideas for a while. I have some vodka and gin ideas that we’re going to try and roll through.

Then we’re going to try to move into a self sustaining barrel ageing program. Right now we do a lot, we’ve been barrel aging some stuff. Like I mentioned to you before Direwolf was a 18 month project we did right before we started with the interview. We took bourbon barrels and infected them in our warehouse and we put beer into them and then used four 50 gallon controls of fruit to blend and make this beer. An ambitious project no doubt. Then after we’re seeing some success with that we started another one which will be out in about a year and then some like barrel aged Pumpkin and winter beer. With the distillery we’re hoping to get in a variation of these barrels to produce some all ourselves. Once we get the liquid out of them we can roll right in.

Then we have a few other things going on that I got to be mum about at the moment but I think that’s enough work to keep me busy either way.

David: Yeah, I’d agree, I’d agree. Well Alex if someone wanted to, if any of our listeners wanted to get more information about Grand Canyon Brewing or to kind of find you guys or your beer where would they go to do that?

Alex: Basically anywhere in Phoenix Arizona area. I guess to kind of narrow it down more, for the most part most chains carry us here but our best chain partners are Safeway, Fry’s, Sprouts, Whole Foods. We also have a tremendous relationship with Total Wine and BevMo! and they carry most if not all local packaging anyways. Any independent bottle shop will usually have us and what’s really great too is like let’s say for instance the Shotgun program I’d briefly mentioned because all those beers are allocated the moment they’re released, Shotgun account receives Shotgun beers, that’s kind of how it works.

We’re creating on our website an icon where you can just click on it and then by city it’ll break down where you can go and find that beer on draft. That is a great resource to use if you’re just looking for our beer in general or some of our specialties but most craft beer bars all over the place … I guess it’s harder to try to, I don’t know. Like I said, Bashas’ doesn’t carry us currently and that’s a relationship we’re working on but for the most part if you walk into a store you can find one or two of our brands but if you want to find all of our stuff and you want to have a good selection Whole Foods, Total Wine are dead ringers for that, usually BevMo! is pretty good. Then independent bottle shops, I can’t say it enough, shop local, support local businesses, all these guys that have local shops that buy my beer they’re also my friends too and that’s how you become their friends. You start selling them beer and then you’re cool, they’re cool and it helps them pay their mortgage so I’m always about that shop local action.

I guess that’s a little brief overview of where you can find our beers. We also have 2 locations in Williams at the brew pub, the brand new brew pub that opened up last month at 301 North 7th Street in Williams and then at Cruiser’s at our original 233 Route 66 location in Williams we have all of our stuff as well, there’s all our apparel and all that fun stuff. You can go to the website to www.grandcanyonbrewery.com for any other additional information. Then I personally answer all the Webmaster and info questions, those come right to me and I just respond directly to enquiries.

David: Wow, all right, awesome. Alex I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us and I’ll just say that as a fan of your beer anyone listening out there, anyone in the audience do yourself a favor if you’re in Nevada or in Arizona and pick up some beer or if you happen to be in South Korea pick up some beer from them. Alex thanks again so much.

Alex: All right, thank you.

David: All right, so what I found so compelling about this interview is his relentless obsession with embodying a brand that accurately reflects the small town that they’re located in. Not only that he tries to identify with his area. Now catch this, I love that he said they’re not trying to grow that large outside of their current distribution area, they are going outside of the country but they’re always trying to create better beer and they want to engage with the people that are close to them, the states that surround them. He realizes very intensely that it’s not about growing as big and broad as you can instead it’s about going deep with the people that are already fans.

This is a huge talking point. When you create raging fans it’s about going deep with them, making them bigger and better fans of the brand that they are already in love with. It’s not always about trying to create new ones and I think that this is a great way to monetize any business whether you’re in beer or you’re in coffee or you do a service or you’re a CPA it does not matter. If people are absolutely crazy about you they can’t say enough about you, they can’t get enough of what you do, you will grow your revenue year in and year out.

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