We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sean Arsenault a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Sean, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the decision of whether to donate a percentage of sales to an organization or cause – we’d love to hear the backstory of how you thought through this.
We donate a percentage of the sales of every pint of our flagship Wayne’s Pale Ale to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Disease research. My father is Wayne and he currently suffers from Parkinson’s.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I own Brewery ARS, a small 10 BBL garage brewery located at 1927 – 1929 West Passyunk Ave in South Philadelphia and a taproom in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia located at 2223 Frankford Ave. Our focus is to create the very best beer for the city of Philadelphia.
I got my start in the brewing industry by homebrewing with my twin brother at our row home in South Philadelphia. What starting out as a part time hobby quickly turned into a full time obsession. After a few extract batches I quickly switched to all grain brewing and have been hooked ever sense. At one point, we had 4 fridges in our row home. One fridge for primary fermentation, one fridge for lagering, another fridge for serving the beer from, and one for food. At the height of my homebrewing hobby I was offered a job as a business development engineer for Arkema in France, During my time in France, I had the opportunity to visit over a hundred breweries in England, Denmark, and Belgium. Many friendships were formed (and many beers were consumed!) and I was lucky enough to brew a collaboration beer with Brewery T’ Gaverhopke in Belgium.
We have one flagship beer that’s always on tap and in cans and that’s Wayne’s Pale Ale, named after my father. It’s our best selling beer and it’s the beer that gives me the greatest sense of pride to keep doing what I’m doing. My father Wayne suffers from Parkinson’s Disease. We donate a portion of the sales of every pint to the Micheal J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. We’re having an event at our brewery on August 18th called Wayne’s World. It’s a fundraising event for the Michael J. Fox foundation for Parkinson’s Research and a celebration of my dear father. You can donate here if you’d like: https://give.michaeljfox.org/fundraiser/4790313
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
One big time pivot for our brewery was covid. Our business model changed immediately as all on premise beer consumption was prohibited. We switched to a to go only business model where our customers ordered online and then picked up their beer at our brewery via contactless pick-up. We also created a weekly delivery business where we delivered our beer directly to consumers. It were these two pivots that kept us afloat during covid and most importantly we were able to retain all of our employees during this difficult period.
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
I would love to host bands at our brewery but it’s simply too small of a venue. In order to bring live music to our small brewery I created The Great American Riff Off. The rules are simple. Each guitarist has one minute to play your best guitar riff. Prizes are awarded to the top three riff wizards. What sounded like a silly idea has turned into an annual event that brings a nice variety of talented musicians to our brewery. It’s my favorite event that we host at our brewery.
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