We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Philip Brandes a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Philip, appreciate you joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

Non-alc craft beer has traditionally suffered from the stigma of bad taste, uninspired styles, and poor quality. When I started Bravus, I knew I had to change that. So I set out to create an entirely new method of creating non-alc craft beer; one that doesn’t remove the alcohol like everyone else. After all, a great chef doesn’t put in a lot of ingredients just to take them out later.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I was inspired to start the company when two seemingly diverse aspects of my life converged. I was fascinated by the craft beer movement, having tagged along with my brother – a sales manager for a local brewery – to a few of these “limited can releases,” where you stand in line for hours just to buy a one-off beer produced by a brewery. It was crazy…these lines would snake around the block and hours later you would finally get your beer. I realized what a demand there was but wondered if there was a way to get in to the business without competing with the thousands of breweries already on the market. Around the same time an old high school friend, who had been home brewing for many years, went sober. He had enjoyed craft beer a bit too much and it was affecting his family life. So he started drinking those grocery store N/A lagers like O’Douls and Sharps. I had never tasted one before and when I did, immediately spit it out. I asked him if there were any IPAs or Stouts on the market and he said “sadly, no.” It was at that point I told him I would solve that problem for him provided he taught me how to home brew. So I built a small brewery in my garage, he taught me how to brew, and about 60 batches of beer later I finally stumbled upon a great-tasting non-alcoholic IPA. Of course by that time I had spent so much time and money that my wife, a CPA, insisted that I start a company around it so I could write it all off. Shortly thereafter, Bravus was born.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

Because a good chunk of our business is DTC, we have a huge, built-in focus group which allows us to test new ideas, get feedback on existing ones, and steer the direction of future styles. A lot of craft breweries are helmed by brewers that dictate a lot of those choices. And more often than not, those brewers want to build a name for themselves or win competitions. So they end up producing very obscure styles. While we love to foster creativity in all our staff, unfortunately, those beers don’t often sell well. We are firm believers in gearing our brews for our customers, since they are the ones ultimately purchasing the beer.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Attention to quality and flavor. The non-alc craft beer market has always suffered from a taste problem, and we really had to dig deep and reinvent the process in order to produce great-tasting liquid. Our production process isn’t that much different from traditional beer brewing, which in itself makes is very different from the processes historically utilized for non-alcoholic beer. That’s because almost all non-alcoholic beer is made via alcohol removal, either by burning off the alcohol or filtering it out. The problem is, doing so is heavy-handed and you end up removing a lot of the key flavor and mouthfeel components that make beer, well, a beer. We developed a process that doesn’t remove the alcohol. That is why it is almost impossible to tell the difference between our beer and an alcoholic craft beer.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ww.w.bravus.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bravusbrewco/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bravusbrewco
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bravusbrewco
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/bravusbrewco