Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Tom Weber. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Tom, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. 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.

The things that Bass & Brews does differently than other fishing content creators, is we add the artistic flair and the comradery of great friends. There are alot of similar content creators out there but they all seem to follow the same model. They create barebones videos/content with only the one creator while following one topic. I take my love of fishing and skills of art and merge it with my good friend Devon and his knowledge of beer. Together, I have created the Bass & Brews brand of quirky and fun bass fishing videos with a spin of great beer reviews. All this boils down to our tag line “If you can’t catch a fish, you can always catch a buzz!”

Tom, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We are the Bass & Brews. A fun and quirky bass fishing channel with a spin of great beer reviews.

This began as a few things coming together and turned into what we are now. I have always loved fishing. Ever since I was a small boy and caught my first 24″ Northern Pike at the age of 6, I was hooked. From there on I wanted nothing but to go fishing. Just ask my family as I was growing up and even my wife and friends now. Fishing is always the first thing on my mind. As I grew up this became easier to accomplish, but then life started to get in the way and I started to fall away from my love of fishing, until I met my good friend Devon “Brews” as a co-worker. We hit it off right away as we both enjoyed fishing and great beer. That’s when the idea started to begin filming our fishing trips and talk about the great beer we were enjoying at the same time. That now gave purpose to my love of fishing and brought it back to the forefront of activities in my life. What started out with a borrowed GoPro and a canoe has now grown into a multi-camera and microphone setup on a 17.5ft fishing boat. This endeavor was just as much of an excuse to spend time with friends as it was a way for me to get back to my therapeutic love of fishing.

While the fishing, friends, and beers are a huge part of the channel, the other ingredient is the artistic flair. I am an animator by trade, so naturally I couldn’t wait to have an outlet that could mix my love of fishing and art. I also cannot forget one more important factor that drives the general feel of our content. Being a gamer, fishing games has always been something I have been interested in but there haven’t been many games that do it right, except for one. Bass Landing on the Playstation One is the best fishing game out there. Their formula was to give you a simple serene experience while fishing but turn on the excitement and flash while catching. That is what drives the visuals in our content. Just like in the game, we run a nice simple bluegrass audio track in the background until we hook into a fish and its all rock and roll from there! All this is what has lead to the added graphics and animations that make our videos something different. I have a blast creating and sharing all this love with our viewers

I am the most proud of the time I spend with my friends in the boat and the audience we have grown with all this fun and work. I look forward to every trip and it has been such a pleasure to watch our audience grow and connect with us. We have already created some great relationships and partnerships with other startups in the industry like our recent partnership with D-Lane Baits. It has been very rewarding to bring a lot of things that I love to the world, and they love it too.

Lastly, the thing that I want our audience to know about us is that we are not trying to be anything that we aren’t. We are not professional fisherman, videographers, or beer critics and we are never going to be. We are just a group of folks who are getting out and enjoying what they love, learning a lot along the way. We strive to bring the things we have learned to our community and would like to invite our audience to enjoy our content but to also get out there and enjoy the things that they love.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

This might initially seem vague but I think that non-creatives struggle with the “why” of the creative journey. More so, why spend all the time and effort into a “look”. I think it can be seen as a waste of time. Not that the end product is bad or unenjoyable, normally the opposite, but once it is learned the time it takes to create it, the product does not seem worth the time.

To this I give a two-fold response. I think that part of the time involved on the best creative pieces is the journey that has to be taken to create it. Most great pieces start out with a vision or an idea. Then you take the steps to make it a reality, but the best pieces are when the journey shifts. Something clicks or an inspiration happens during the creative journey of the piece and then the piece transcends what it was going to be into something unimagined at the beginning. This doesn’t always happen in this extraordinary fashion, but we strive for it and are excited by the “Click” what it does happen. That is just part of why things take as long as they do. You never know when inspiration will build the piece into something great.

The other part is the love of it all. Its just like anything that each of us love. Its different for all of us but there is something that we all care to spend that extra effort on. For me its being creative but for others it might be baking, working on cars, woodworking, sports, or anything else that we strive to put our time and effort into and be good at. We spend the extra time and effort because we love doing it. We do this even if it is our day job, or if 3 months of work turns into only 15 seconds of animation. This is what we love doing and a job well done is always rewarding, especially when that job can be enjoyed by everyone.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

At first I don’t think I knew or understood my mission but an observation helped define it. I was having a conversation about fishing and I summed it up in only a few words. “There is nothing digital about it”. It rang so true to me after I said it, and I think it has a truth for a lot of us. My world is full of so many digital things. I am an animator by trade so I work on a PC all day. I communicate and interact with a lot of the world through my phone. Our favorite shows are on streaming services and my second favorite pass time is gaming on another device. So much of our world is digital and controlled by a program one way or another that its easy to loose sight as to were that ends. Fishing and the outdoors has nothing digital about it. We might be able to use our devices to help us get there or know what to do once we are there. Once we are there, its just you, a rod and the water. There is no algorithm that determines if the fish will bite or not. You have to make that happen, and sometimes it doesn’t for no reason that you can fathom. There is an option for true randomness and that is a nice change of pace and something I thoroughly enjoy.

This observation has helped to define what my mission is for this fishing channel. I am bringing the outdoors to a digital device, but I am hoping in turn that I can help my viewers get outside and see it for themselves. It is my hope to help someone break from our digital lives, even for a little, while and enjoy the rest of the world without our screens. Don’t get me wrong, I am not anti-digital anything. I make a living in a completely digital field, but everything in moderation right? Lets go interact with something that is not plugged in.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: bass.n.brews
• Facebook: Bass & Brews
• Youtube: youtube.com/c/BassBrews