BeerBud kicks off crowd-funding campaign to import thousands of rare beers

THIS company wants to harness the collective power of drinkers to bring the best craft beers from all over the world straight to your door — at wholesale prices.

Generic photo of men drinking beer. Picture: Supplied

WE DON’T usually write about crowd-funding campaigns — because honestly why would you? — but this might just be one we can get behind.

With beer consumption in Australia at 67-year lows, the industry is in need of a boost.

One online beer company wants to help get Aussies drinking again by bringing them thousands of hard-to-find craft beers from all over the world.

In return, it’s promising backers wholesale prices on their beers for five years. Sounds like a pretty good deal.

“We’ve already identified thousands of beers from hundreds of breweries which we can get our hands on,” said Andy Williamson, co-founder of online beer retailer BeerBud. “But we need some help to purchase those beers upfront.”

The campaign, running on crowd-funding platform Pozible, will let users have their say and vote on the beers they want from anywhere in the world.

That could mean beers like the Westvleteren XII, the hard-hitting 10.2 per cent ale brewed by Trappist monks at a Belgian monastery, which is regularly rated the best in the world.

“If you want the highest rated beers in the world, we’ll go and get them. If there’s a favourite beer that you’ve never been able to get before, let us know and we’ll go and find it,” said Mr Williamson.

Supporters will be able to choose between rewards offering beer at wholesale prices for one, three or five years, as well as VIP access to pre-sales and special offers, or a mixed case of selected international beers.

Mr Williamson said the crowd-funding campaign was an attempt to tap into the growing trend in the beer industry towards collaboration.

“What was once a fiercely cutthroat industry controlled by foreign owned multinationals, is shifting towards a more friendly, collaborative environment of independent craft breweries, gypsy breweries and collaboration brews,” he said.

Supporters will be rewarded with wholesale prices for five years.

“Recently, this shift has seen the emergence of beer related crowd-funding campaigns to raise money for a variety of projects which have broken crowd-funding records the world over.”

BeerBud, which was founded eight months ago by three former investment bankers, claims to have seen strong double-digit month-on-month growth since launch, shipping thousands of orders and turning over hundreds of thousands in revenue.

Mr Williamson says the next step is to increase its range from 200 beers to over 1000, partly through a new distribution deal with Lion to add its entire range to the store, including James Squire, Little Creatures and White Rabbit.

“That’s been a massive endorsement,” he said. “They want to get behind us and push us as a social destination for beer.”

He added that BeerBud’s model benefited the big alcohol companies as much as the small independent brewers, given the industry’s reliance on Coles and Woolworths, which have huge power to dictate terms to suppliers.

“They see great value in our distribution platform,” he said.

Beer and crowd-funding do seem to go schooner-in-hand. Last year, California-based Stone Brewing Company set a new record for most contributors to any campaign when it raised $US2.5 million on Indigogo.

New Zealand’s craft-brewing industry has led the boom in equity crowd-funding, with Renaissance Brewing raising $NA700,000 this month and Yeastie Boys raising $NZ500,000 in just half an hour.

BeerBud ran its first successful crowd-funding campaign last year to brew Prickly Mo, a not-for-profit beer to raise funds to Movember.

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