Better Beer, part-owned by comedy outfit The Inspired Unemployed, has grand ambitions

Better Beer might be co-owned by comedy outfit The Inspired Unemployed, but the company is dead serious about taking on the big brewers at their own game.

The Inspired Unemployed, also known as Matt Ford and Jack Steele.

About five years ago Nick Cogger gave The Inspired Unemployed their first paid gig as influencers, shelling out $500 for them to promote his promoting his alcoholic kombucha brand at a music festival.

These days the two comedians, Matt Ford and Jack Steele, have more than two million followers on Instagram, last year debuted a television show and their own fragrance - Inspire by No. Emploi - and have been profiled in GQ Australia.

And - after the pair and Cogger decided that launching a beer three years ago would be a great idea - they are 46 per cent equity holders in Better Beer which was reportedly valued at about $80m earlier this year, and is aiming to boost its production to 18 million litres of beer this financial year.

The growth of the brand has been stupendous, but as Cogger explained to The Australian, far from an accident.

Cogger himself is a beverage industry veteran, having owned the Frontbeach Taphouse in Torquay, Victoria, for more than nine years before founding the Torquay Beverage Co in 2018.

In 2019 he was looking for a way to promote his alcoholic kombucha brand.

“I spotted these guys, they had about 20,000 followers on social media, so I reached out to them to promote my kombucha brand,’’ Cogger says.

“I paid them $500 to drive from Kiama to Canberra to a music festival.

“(After that) I tried to get them involved in a seltzer brand that I launched, but we ended up not doing that. And then they came to me with a beer plan.’’

Better Beer by The Inspired Unemployed.

Ford and Steele were keen on launching a bottom-up, craft brewery endeavour, however Cogger’s industry experience led him to advise against that plan.

“I explained to them that it was a dying industry, there’s 800 people competing for 8 per cent of the market,’’ Cogger says.

“Why don’t we be one of three people competing for 90 per cent of the market and go against Great Northern and Carlton Dry and Tooheys and Hahn, because no one else is going against them, they’ve got it all to themselves.

“Let’s just go in there and completely disrupt it and get the liquid right, which we did.

“They were involved in the brand building, they came up with the name Better Beer and the go-to-market strategies.’’

But launching a successful beer brand - into a market which is shrinking overall - is about much more than a good idea and a catchy name.

Cogger says production, distribution, and of course the star power of Ford and Steele have all played a huge part.

“Firstly, off the back of Covid, Matt and Jack became the new Paul Hogan, dropped from the 70s or 80s,’’ Cogger says.

“They became the people that everyone wanted to see win.

“Everyone during Covid looked forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays when they posted, and it felt like Australia and New Zealand just got behind these guys for bringing some hope into the world.’’

Better Beer's Matt Ford, on the right.

And then there was the liquid itself.

“Zero carb wasn’t really done before that,’’ Cogger says.

“The global beer trend and the global drinking trend is ‘better for you, be healthy, cut your calories, cut your carbs’ so getting the liquid right was key.

“The next part with Better Beer was having a place to be able to scale.’’

Other operators, when looking to make a step change in production, have needed to invest millions, if not tens of millions of dollars each time they scale up, Cogger says.

“It’s really hard to find a story that gets to our size without a brewery,’’ Cogger says.

“For example Stone & Wood, they grew, but they had to throttle their growth because every time they wanted to grow, they had to put another 10, 20, 30, 50 million into plant and equipment which meant they couldn’t scale and really strike while the iron was hot.’’

Better Beer’s secret weapon was having its beer produced and packed by John Casella’s Australian Beer Co, which coincidentally was also looking to fill a gap left by the end of a Coca Cola joint venture.

Dealing with Casella’s operation was seamless, with Cogger finding their phone number online and connecting with the head of the brewery within 5 minutes.

“Within 15 minutes he was packing some liquid samples,’’ Cogger says.

Producing the beer at John Casella’s Australian Beer Co has been crucial to the brand’s success.

The trio also kept their powder dry on the marketing front, not letting slip that the beer would launch until it was actually on the shelves - in Dan Murphy’s and BWS no less - meaning people could actually go and buy the product - a step many celebrity product endorsements stuff up, Cogger says.

“So when we launched, people could get it,’’ he says.

“Then it was just that hype train of selling out a significant amount of beer in that first week and then spending six months with sporadic stock.

“Store managers would get called up every day getting asked ‘have you got Better Beer? Can you put it aside for us?’’’

The initial Dan Murphy’s order was 13,000 cartons which was meant to last three months.

It sold out in a week, and the business was scrambling to stay ahead of demand from then on.

Cogger says the beer has redefined how lager is packaged and marketed in Australia, remaining quintessentially Australian, while staying away from traditional beer marketing tropes.

Meanwhile on the social media front, they’re killing it.

Ford and Steele have the aforementioned two million followers just on Instagram, and the marketing is very much around being entertaining, rather than pushing product. The brand itself has 191,000 followers.

The company got caught up, in a minor way, in the collapse of listed craft beverages accelerator Mighty Craft, which had an equity stake in Better Beer.

They toyed with the idea of folding Better Beer into the listed entity, but deemed the move would have come too soon, Cogger says.

Pure Asset Management assumed Mighty Craft’s 33 per cent equity stake, with Ford and Steele owning 46 per cent, and Cogger and another investor the rest.

In terms of the path forward from here, the trajectory is similarly ambitious to the performance to date.

“We think we’ve got the liquid formats to take it up to Great Northern and Hahn and XXXX,’’ Cogger says.

“We think there’s room for a third big brewer in Australia and we believe we can be that brewer.

“What we’re going to do is, for the next couple of years, is just go as hard as we can, get those extra 4500 bottle shops, build that out to maybe another 6000 or 7000.

“And we’ll probably look at different strategies, but it would more than likely take us to the stock market if that recovers, I think that’s probably the route we’re going to go down.’’

Meanwhile, with Ford and Steele still intimately involved in the marketing side of the business, the group chat is going off with messages at all times of the day, all going into the mix to make a bigger Better Beer.

Originally published as Better Beer, part-owned by comedy outfit The Inspired Unemployed, has grand ambitions