Beer Buzz: FunkWerks Benefits From Brooklyn Brewery Alignment And Beer Name Problems

American Craft Beer|March 25th, 2019|

The beer biz never sleeps at American Craft Beer. And here’s some more of what’s been happening in the beer world while you were drinking your way through a weekend of March Madness.

Colorado Brewery Partners To Strengthen its Bottom Lines (Denver, CO) – Colorado is currently home to nearly 400 craft breweries. And with more than 150 additional breweries expected to open in 2019 things are getting uber-competitive. And breweries like Funkwerks are entering into business alignments to strengthen their positions.

In 2017 Fort Collins’ Funkwerks partnered with the Brooklyn Brewery and the 21st Amendment Brewery in San Leandro, CA to create an expansive shared platform for sales and distribution nationwide. They’ve formed a defensive family of breweries, and in Brooklyn Brewery’s announcement they added that they hoped to add new names to the venture in 2019.

“Brooklyn Brewery’s financial support allowed Funkwerks to purchase a state-of-the-art lab and a new packaging line” according to 5280, but the biggest benefit of its new alignment was its “integrated sales team and access to an established distributor network.”

Words To Drink By (Fort Collins, CO) – “We knew that there was no way that we were going to be able to grow how we wanted to grow on our own. Without having a proper sales team, you can’t expand.” Funkwerks’ co-owner Brad Lincoln to 5280

Hindu and Don’ts (Salem, VA) – A Virginia brewing company recently apologized for a beer that shares its name with a Hindu deity after being called “disrespectful” by Hindu representatives…

In an effort to diffuse the unexpected uproar Olde Salem Brewing explained that it was just making a musical reference… In a post on its website, Hanuman was described as a Spanish Milk Stout inspired by a decade-old Rodrigo y Gabriela song bearing the same name.

Odd 13 Brewing also made the similar mistake of naming an IPA after the Hindu God in 2014. And only hours after Hindu statesman Rajan Zed spearheaded a protest, the beer’s name (which originally came from a Facebook contest) was withdrawn.

Bottom Line – Don’t even think about naming a beer Hanuman.