How Beavertown built a £100m craft beer cult

The first Beavertown pint was brewed in a kitchen rice pan in 2011.

10 years later, they’d been bought out by Heineken for over £100m,

All while being the most expensive pint in the country, and surviving a pandemic where most breweries lost 95% of their business overnight.

The difference was savant-level positioning.

Here are 3 levers Beavertown pulled to do it:

Glasses that are supposed to be stolen

Beavertowns colourful, weird designs really stood out from traditional pint glasses.

During my time managing a London pub, getting other breweries to restock us with branded glassware was like pulling teeth.

But Beavertown would proactively check with us to see if we needed more - often offering them unprompted.

It was an open secret that Beavertown actually wanted customers to steal their glasses.

And every pilfered glass at a house party became a mini-billboard placed exactly where you’re most likely to influence others' drinking habits.

You’re generating brand ambassadors of the exact sort you want  - slightly rebellious consumers who’d nick something (relatively trivial).

Market like a rock band

One of Beavertown’s slogans is “think like a band, not a brand”.

You want people to emotionally connect to what you’re doing. That’s how you get long-term fans (not just one-time customers). 

They leant heavily into their musical heritage (the founder’s dad is Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin), platforming niche bands with cult followings at gigs in pubs—which eventually grew into fully fledged outdoor festivals.

Attendees were thrilled that someone had finally brought their hidden gem to their city.

And, of course, Beavertown were selling their beer at the venue all the while.

Instead of running some generic awareness campaign, Beavertown seeded cities with ‘cool moments’.

This meant they appeared in everyone's Instagram feed anyway - but in the form of user-generated content that built far more loyalty and intrigue than ‘traditional’ ad campaigns.

This strategy came to a head in 2023 when Beavertown partnered with literal Queens of the Stone Age.

They worked together on a music video set in the visual universe of Beavertown's flagship Neck Oil IPA.

QOTSA had been AWOL for a couple of years prior, so Beavertown rode the wave of all the surrounding press and anticipation for new music.

"What we are trying to do from a marketing strategy perspective is to make the brand even more famous. How do we take that love and take that artwork and creativity and connect it with people?"

Hijacking social moments (so you never forget them)

Beavertown is never just selling funky IPA in a glass -  they’re selling the time their customers feel free and at ease.

Beavertown doesn’t sell beer as much as it sells social experiences. Stay with me here.

Their "Is This Seat Taken?" campaign, targeted the problem of social anxiety in pub settings.

Their research found that 54% of adults wanted to meet new people, but 35% struggled to initiate conversations with strangers.

So Beavertown scattered bright blue stools with their signature skull artwork in London pubs so strangers could pull up a chair and make new friends!

Now Beavertown is responsible for that great night you had. That friend you made.

And it caught fire with journalists. Because Beavertown were bringing them fully-formed stories and making their lives a hell of a lot easier

• Hot button issue likely to resonate (loneliness)

• First-party research and stats (actual news, not just opinion)

• A novel and eye-catching solution

We saw it again with their “Open Up’ crisps in collaboration with a mental health charity.

Each pack included prompts like "What gets you through tough times?" and "If you could give your younger self advice, what would it be?".

So under the guise of a social good (which we have to give them credit for, I suppose), they’ve woven themselves into your “deep meaningful convos”.

Notice how Beavertown positions itself as a facilitator of authentic moments rather than just dispassionate pint churners.

And what do Brits like more than making friends over beer?

Making friends over beer in SUMMER.

Beavertown tapped into a post-COVID thirst for beer gardens by inserting themselves into the key summer pain points.

Their "Oil Your Neck" campaign is a banging example of this. They found:

• 36% of Londoners get sunburned while sitting in pub gardens

• Only 20% consistently used sun protection

So Beavertown created a branded SPF 50 sunscreen to distribute for free with pints of Neck Oil.

Again, beyond the first-order benefits (that burn-free customer is now a fan), this move also grabbed outsized media coverage from the sheer novelty factor.

They doubled down on the summer associations with UV-activated beer mats, which revealed hidden walking trails when exposed to sunlight.

In so doing, they hijacked the quintessential "pub walk" as a Beavertown-branded adventure.

The beer mats directed drinkers to unexpected destinations: ancient burial sites, stone circles, crypts, and other hidden historical landmarks.

Now, all the memories from those walks are inextricably tied to the brand.

The final summer touchpoint I’ll mention (there were many more) was a twist on a walking tour over bank holiday weekend - where Bevertown distributed thousands of free cans of (low-alcohol) beer + vouchers redeemable at local pubs.

Each of these moves helped Beavertown weasel into every part of the summer as the lynchpin to an unforgettable day, not just “a nice beer I had”.

For more…

• This talk with Marketing Director Tom Rainsford lays out the Band vs Brand culture really nicely. How to stand out, how to ‘measure fame’. Well worth a watch (30 mins).

• Tom on a panel discussing why ‘niche is the new mainstream’. Some gold here about creatively using small, local projects to get national attention. (55 mins, it’s better to skip around to just hear what Tom has to say frankly).

P.S Check out last week’s piece to learn how Grind Co. grew to 14 coffee shops and nationwide distribution.

And shoot me an email with who I should cover next 😀