117 - How to Revive a Legacy Beer Brand (+8.2%) feat. Rob Day of Wachusett Brewing

0:00You need someone that just talks to you regularly.

0:03Rob Day: Yeah, like every brand needs that. There's bullying you. Bully, beat you up. Fat shaming. If you can withstand the bullying, then you must have something foundationally strong. If it starts to put you off your mark, then yeah, all right. Yeah, I don't know. Go sell something else. Don't make beer.

0:30Hey, Cody, what's up? Not a whole lot, Isaac. How are you doing today?

0:35Rob Day: Cody, I'm doing much better than normal because friend of the show, Rob Day, is here with us. It's not just you and me. Rob, hello. Hello. Great to be here and proud to be a friend of the show. The only friend of the show. The best friend of the show, Rob Day. I keep hearing that. All we got. They're a handful of friends. It's all we need. This is a very loose episode. And just so we don't bury the lead here, we're having you back on. We're more than a year out from watch use. It's rebrand, like maybe 14, 15 months, something like that. But we want to discuss how it's gone. And before doing that, we should probably rewind and have you for folks.

1:16Rob Day: So we will link in the show notes our case study and our first podcast on this project. But for people that might not have heard that story, can you please just give us a quick overview of what you do, who Barrel One is, but then also Wachusett's history and what the brand looked like leading up to Barrel One Collective acquiring it? Yeah, for sure. So it's kind of a fun, unique history to tell for sure. So I'm Rob. I'm the vice president of marketing at Barrel One Collective. Wachusett is one of our brands in the portfolio. We operate 14 total beverage alcohol brands across the spectrum. major focus in the Northeast, especially with legacy craft beer brands like Wachusett and Harpoon and Smutty Nose and Long Trail.

1:55So sort of our wheelhouse to operate these brands that help build the craft beer industry. The history for Wachusett is a major part of that story in Massachusetts, founded in 1994, so a good 32 years ago, by three friends, Ned, Peter, and Kevin. And, you know, the old story, it's a very typical craft beer story. They're doing other stuff, engineers by trade and wanted to get out of that and make beer. Jumped on the family well, drained it, got kicked off the farm, moved down the street, have been there since. So I love those stories. There's some version of it, you know, everywhere you go. And it's really cool to track those and say, oh, that's, you know, people are really industrious to get this business going.

2:37And we kind of take that for granted in 2026, where, you know, beer is everywhere and beer is great. And those stories are a dime a dozen, I'll say. But these are these are what helped build the business. And so that's a good again, 32 years ago. And they went on a really nice tear building a very good scrappy craft beer business up into the 2010s. Really solid growth fueled by the blueberry beer, which has always been a mainstay for the category and for this particular brand. So really nice job creating a recipe that was a huge success in this state and beyond. And then they sort of took a really interesting track around 2013 during the growth period.

3:23The team from Montauk Brewing Down in Long Island partnered up with them and started a significant contract relationship. That brand was also on a tear of its own. So they're both doing some significant business and together grew to nearly 70 ,000 barrels of beer in 2017. That's both the Montauk volume and the Watch You Sip volume, but it was coming out of the one facility in Westminster, Mass. So really impressive work across that period. And then, you know, things started to change over that time, 2018, you know, few hits to the numbers, but still looking pretty good. There was a major shakeup in leadership in 2020.

4:08A new group came in from the investor side and started making some production changes. I think we all know Montauk ended up selling to Tilray and moving all their production volume out. That left sort of a hollow shell of volume. And we all know that's really tough to fill. a really interesting twist I don't know if we've gotten into this of the story is in 2017 Wachusett was on such a tear that our one of our other brands Smutty Nose was on the the decline in a real problem heading towards a bank auction Wachusett considered purchasing Smutty Nose at the time and that's that's really interesting because fast forward to 2024 the group the Finest Kind Group, headed by Smutty Nose Brewing, purchased Wachusett.

4:58So throughout that period of 2013 to 2024, it went through a lot of changes, both in leadership, direction, contract brewing, not contract brewing, had a pretty significant brand redesign in 2020 under that leadership, and eventually sold in February of 24 to the Finest Kind Group, headed by Smutty Nose again. And and that's that's really where our story starts picking up. At that point, the volume it dropped to is 15000 barrels. So a pretty precipitous drop. I did get my numbers straight. Twenty twenty one was 12 percent down. Twenty two was 14 and 23 was 23 percent down. So I know you all talk about, you know, don't rebrand in a free fall.

5:42This was we hit rock bottom. So we were there. That's that's a good time to get your ducks in a row. And I joined the group on a consulting basis in June of 24 and immediately started this project of redefining what this brand should be. I think I brought y 'all in August. I hope I gave you that much time because we were rolling out work in September, but I probably did not give you that much time for this project. But throughout those preceding months, we did do the hard work of rolling up our sleeves and trying to dig into what the brand strategy and position really were so that we could enter the design phase and be successful with you all.

6:24So that is a long convoluted history, and it also leads to the final step of at the beginning of 2025, the Finest Kind Group merged with the MassBay Brewing Company headed by Harpoon to create Barrow One Collective, and we are now one complete entity.

6:41Rob Day: Thank you. And Cody and I bury the lead always, so we're going to not do that today. How's Wachusett doing? And Blueberry specifically leads the business. So how's Blueberry doing? How's Wachusett doing? And then how does the brand look compared to where things were before the reset? Yeah, it's it's rocking and rolling. It's amazing to see the turnaround, not just the numbers, but the speed. So I did scratch a few numbers here. Closing out 2024, brand was down 11 percent. Blueberry was down 2 percent within that as the flagship. So that it kind of crested down to its bottom volume. And then throughout the calendar year 2025, which includes old product, the brand ended up down 1.2, Blueberry up 6.3.

7:27And if you net out the SKUs we cut, the brand would have been up 3 % as well. So the structure of that was incredible. If you take just the refresh period, which started really in earnest to hit shelves in March, you'd be looking at brand was up 1.2 % and Blueberry was up 8.2 % over that period. That includes a December in this industry that we saw significant inventory controls at the distribution level. Everyone tightened up to close the year the best they could. So our numbers at the end of the year skewed down compared to where it was throughout. We saw months that were double digits up throughout the summer, which was amazing to see.

8:07And we've already started the year up for 2026. So really happy with all of that. And if you look at sort of the 12-month rolling of the reset, Blueberry's up 7.2%, which in a business, I think we're tracking volume down in the fives depending on the report you look at. I like to say it's a 12.2 % swing and give myself all the credit for it. That credit belongs to us. We'll get into that here in a moment. You'll take it in the next segment, I'm sure. Thank you. It has been about 15 months since the rebrand launched. When you zoom out, what feels fundamentally different about what you sit today compared to before you stepped in and hit the reset button?

8:49Yeah, it's a big question. It's kind of like a teen movie where someone goes through that phase of rediscovering themselves and does the whole montage, comes out the other side, you know, the spectacular version of themselves. But, you know, they were amazing all along. it's a really cheesy analogy but it very very much feels like that you walked in you know numbers are numbers but you know i really look at the the brand and the heart and try to discover you know is there a beating pulse here and there really was and you know i'll give full credit to the the hospitality side of the organization that place in westminster had so much heart so much character it had been glossed over in the the marketing communications it had been glossed over and the packaging, but it was still there and it was beating and it was strong.

9:35And that audience that visits our location were really loyal, lovely customers who were kind of begging for us to highlight who we were and get back to it. That's the honest truth. We didn't create a whole lot that was new. We tapped into what was truly meaningful about the brand. We talk a lot about Essence as you do as well. We had codified that as Commonwealth country. and being able to define that and speak it into existence, it became truer and easier to make decisions. And that was, you know, really a way to gather what we felt about the brand and set a clear direction both for you in design and then how we communicate and sell the brand down the road.

10:20It led to a really, really fun tagline, catch a good time. This brand is a really unique entity in Massachusetts It's in some of the country roots that most people don't associate with the Northeast. But our location, like I said, with the heartbeat, they'd been hosting live music mostly with a country angle for four times a week. Had line dancing out there. There's farmland all around our property. It's really where the essence of the brand lived. Being able to define that in first written language and speak it out loud, focused, where everyone put the brand and how we talked about it. I think it incredibly directed design so that you all could do what you do best and bring it to life visually.

11:07And that set all the raw material for distribution meetings, retail meetings. The energy behind it really just started to snowball from that point. And it hasn't slowed down. People are still talking about it. And one anecdote, I think I might have used this in our last one, but one of our distributors walked out of our ABP with a can of blueberry and took it to Fenway the next day and we placed the beer. The blueberry was the same. The beer was the same. The energy behind what we were doing had completely changed and everyone felt it and got behind it. So I think that's really important to the whole story of how we got here.

11:50But you can feel it throughout the business and it hasn't slowed down in those 12, 13 months.

11:54Rob Day: The old timers that worked there. And you had some old heads. You've been around for 30 plus years. I say that respectfully. there was conversation behind the scenes early on, not, not, not, not coming behind the scenes, but just, and not even concerns, just a, an expression that we want to make sure we involve them and that they, they have a lot of ownership in this rightfully. So they, they all like the direction as well. I imagine, or hope, hope so. You've heard good things internally with the team. Oh, without a doubt. I mean, I, I did visit with, with many of them and had those conversations up front.

12:26I couldn't have done my strategy work without sitting in on those conversations. And, you know, I left those meetings saying, you know, they were disappointed in the previous direction. And I had a lot of pressure to deliver on this because you just can't keep recoding it and hoping it works. So the foundational strategy had to be really solid. And it starts again with the people in that space. And that's where I found the heart of the brand was in Westminster. with the fans that were there and what they were up to. And then, of course, the staff that had been there a long time. Their input fueled a lot of what became the strategy, became the design.

13:05And when we brought it to the team, the energy was really, really good around it. People are really happy with it now, especially when you see it come together as a full collection. It makes sense. And the biggest compliment we've gotten on is this is what it feels like it should have been all along. so we can just delete a handful of years we dug back a little bit brought that forward modernized it for today's shelf and people feel really excited about where this brand sits today

13:36Rob Day: excellent now let's get into slicing and dicing who gets to take credit for this because that's that's what matters so it's all me nobody else so we the reason we're here talking is we were we were shooting this up in uh maine a couple weeks ago and we were we were talking about this very thing. So just to give our listeners kind of an idea of what we were talking about, I guess I'll just ask a question. We always joke that we take credit for our clients' hard work. It's like an open secret. So we help you with the rebrand, navigate the rebrand. Your team breaks your back to sell it. And then that's like all on us.

14:09Rob Day: It's all on our cans. Obviously not how it works. But the rebrand is or was part of this turnaround. So how do you think about the split? How much of rebound comes from the identity and positioning, like the design, like the can, versus you guys doing the hard work of selling the beer every day. So how do you measure it if it even matters? And how do you determine whether or not this was successful? It does matter because I think if you start parsing out one thing being the whole solution, then maybe you only lean on that to get results. And when it doesn't happen, you can say, oh it didn't work but it's it's just not the case so rather than apply percentages oh it was eight percent can 20 percent that's a ridiculous exercise i'd rather use another analogy the the rebranding effort is the coach and can set the vision can set the game plan can have an incredible motivating locker room speech but at the end of the day the players have to get out there and play The coach isn't on the field on the court.

15:13So our goal, both from my side of the marketing strategy, and then your side on the design was to be a good coach for the brand to bring that energy to show a roadmap to success, motivate each player around what they need to do. if we couldn't accomplish that portion the team would would be in chaos of course but again they have to get out there and play so that brand hits you know the abp like i talked about there has to be buy-in at the distributor level there has to be excitement they have to see the vision of where it's heading and they're the front lines for everything we do i mean there's there's thousands of them out there on our behalf uh compared to you know just a couple of us working on this so They have to be bought into the same vision, execute against it.

16:02Our retailers have to get motivated. Our internal sales team has to be motivated. Our production team has to see the vision and feel good about the volume they're going to produce and the quality they have to execute against. Everyone has to get on the same vision and go execute against the game plan. I'm a New Englander, so this is a Bill Belichick do your job moment. We set the vision for the team. we hopefully trained up, but we got to get out there and play. And that hits every single person along the chain down to the consumer. You know, does this connect with them? And if we did our homework up front, it will, it'll resonate and they'll keep coming back for more.

16:41If our, if our game plan was flawed from the beginning, then we're going to see it pretty quickly. So I'm really happy with everything we set forth. But again, we're the coaches in this process. We created a vision. We created a new brand. We put the game plan out there, but we have so many people to thank who went out and executed that game plan and made it happen. If we cut any of those portions out of it, these numbers don't come true. So we have a really pretty cam with shitty sales results and we all point the fingers a year later at why do we spend any money on this? It's 100 % team effort.

17:16That's not meant to be a cliche. And anybody who's listening to this with the thought of their rebrand down the road, you have to get those ducks in a row. It's not possible to do with just a shiny can. So regarding the lift in sales, are you still seeing this driven primarily by Blueberry or have you seen other brands in the portfolio gain traction since the brand reset? This is a really interesting one to dig into. Blueberry is absolutely the dominant force pulling the portfolio. Going back to the question you just asked, that is a directive. We want that to be our flagship. We want that to be our lead.

17:52So you can see that we put the significant focus on that particular product because we had the energy behind it. We believed in its execution. So that is absolutely the one bringing up the ship and driving it. I'll give you the counter of it. In the initial work, we had two lead dogs, Blueberry and Wally. Wally's down over the course of this period since the rebrand. And that's informed a couple of things for us. And we kind of knew it going in. But Wally as an IPA is down eight, nine, 10%, depending on the time slice we look at. And that did get the same sort of treatment. Part of our mission for Wachusett was really around the fruit beers and fruit section.

18:37And that's an IPA. It's kind of proving we have a limited space to play in the very competitive IPA. world and we can't always be two things at once. We did launch during the same period, a double Wally version. So those could share the shelf. If you take both their volume combined, it's about flat, maybe down a percent. So they probably shared a little bit of the business, which shows a real case for focus, which I know I've been a proponent of over a long period of time. But even we can slip up and say, hey, this is a great idea. Let's chase it down and lose focus. But that shows you we added a skew and barely broke even on volume.

19:17That's not the best business case for that product. Now, leaning into where that brand strategy took us, all of our innovation skews for the prior cycle went off gangbusters. So we pushed into the RTD space based on how we redefined the brand and did a blueberry vodka lemonade. We couldn't keep it in stock and we have huge expectations for it this year. We're launching a second skew, a raspberry sweet tea under the same category. So knowing who we are and where we should play guided those decisions and really helped blow up that level of innovation. All of it's performing extremely well. And even the early reads on the 2026 innovation releases are off to an incredible start at the selling level.

20:02So we're really, really optimistic about defining who we are. And I talked about those cut skews going into 2025, most of them IPAs. We had a ton of them. We have an IPA mixed back. We're really finding out that's not where our brand needs to play. And that's the items that we're trimming back and trying to be thoughtful about and figure out what works best for us. And we had a few anomalies. Completely to my surprise, our pumpkin beer was up massively last year, just with the refresh, same beer. And we have a very competitive portfolio and geography for pumpkin. There's a lot going on in New England for pumpkin.

20:41And that was up for the year. And a really interesting one, counter to most of what I just said, is Wajusit, which was a juiced IPA, was up significantly for the year. And I have to tend to believe that that is a fruited IPA, that it's sort of dialing into, you know, if we're going to be a lead fruit beer producer, we keep finding permission to play in that space on the outskirts. So that's the long and short of it, but not everything is up. A lot is down. A lot was cut. A lot was moved strategically. And the things we need to be up and doing are working very well.

21:20Rob Day: I don't think you have the emotional ties to a lot of these brands that someone that's built it for 30 years would. However, giving up volume is still scary. So when you think about it, And you're not saying outright that you're dropping Wally, you're dropping Wally. But from a priority standpoint, if everything's important, nothing's important. So you're setting clear priorities. Yes. Does it ever make sense to just completely shed those weaker performers and put all that money towards the horse? Or is that a dumb way of thinking about it? It depends. I mean, you mentioned no emotional attachment.

21:55I've worked in craft beer for 10 years. I have no emotions left. I am just - Nothing. optimism and deadness inside. No, I joke. I love this business. And I couldn't, I think I'm probably one of the most optimistic people about its future. So really trying to drive that forward. And the way to do that is focus. It's, you've heard it probably for three years on the news cycle, the podcast, focus, focus, focus. You can grow by cutting. It's not usually in the first year. It's down the road. So you need that patience and you need to know when to cut what. Wall-E is still a significant volume for us.

22:35It's not getting cut. It's just down versus the other items. And part of that, again, might be that we launched a double Wall-E and they're sharing volume and consumer occasions. So that was a moment where I can admit to a lack of focus and it hasn't performed. Again, one new SKU to get flat volume, that's not a great business model. We don't want to manage more SKUs for the same amount of volume. So that's how we look at it. There's no clear volume threshold. There are items in our portfolio that serve strategic purposes, and then there's volume drivers. And we make a very critical evaluation for every brand we operate, usually on a monthly basis.

23:15We're looking down the road and deciding which items to focus on, which might have run their course, which have potential if we put the extra work in. and that's really how we make the decisions. And usually when you make those trimming focused decisions, you'll see some struggles in that first year as that volume just disappears and gets cut and you have to make it up and you can't make all the volume up in a single year, but it starts to build on itself. And the long story is that those focused skews and where you put your energy perform better in the long-term when you don't have all the distractions.

23:49Rob Day: You spoke about innovation a moment ago. I wanna go back to it. With the RTD specifically, specifically a lot of our work you know this because we talk all the time a lot of our work over the last several years has been helping people figure out can we extend into this segment or should we create a new brand or how do we get into xyz when we were in maine talking it sounded like there was very little convincing to get to extend from beer into the uh the vodka lemonade like it just kind of made sense can you just talk about that process internally and why like because i think there's a consumer question there's a flavor question there's an occasion like just talk about that and why it made sense and why you're seeing growth there.

24:26And I always start consumer first. And, you know, where do we have permission to play is the cliche, but you have to ask those questions. When we redefined the Wachusett brand, no part of it had thick anchors in beer alone. Nothing we sat down and said was important to us was beer has to be beer, has to be malt hops, water, and yeast. Nothing in our work, our research, our goals, our vision anchored in pure beer. And that's not the same for all of our brands. Some of them are very, very beer focused and that's what that audience is looking for. But for this, we saw, again, a lifestyle around that catch a good time.

25:09We saw fruit and especially blueberry. And we want to own that blueberry space in our region. It's our flagship. We've been at it the longest. It was a very popular flavor across the board last year. So we saw a lot of competition come at us. So those numbers are against dozens of new SKUs coming into our market. And we still beat it out and showed growth. And I think that's also spurring other people to look at the data and do more blueberries. So we're going to have competition that keeps coming. We want to own that in the consumer mind space. So there was really no friction to say, what is the risk?

25:41So if we launch this and it doesn't work, have we hurt our mother brand? And the answer is no, of course not. We put out a blueberry-fruited-boozy product, and it may not connect as a product, but it might. And everything about it said it fits the brand vision and our mission. So we rolled it out with very little expectations and quickly started playing catch-up because it did way better. We put in 70K stacks out in some places, and it was moving over a weekend. It just, it was wildly unexpected. I'd love to say I'm a genius and you should blow up, but far from it. We said, this is worth trying.

26:16It checks all the boxes. Let's do it. And then we spent the rest of the year catching up to the volume. I think that's the core of it. Does this fit what your consumer wants? Will it hurt your core mission statement? Does it confuse people about your brand? This clearly had no confusion built in. So there was a zero risk proposition to rolling it out and extending the brand.

26:36Rob Day: Rob, you talked about wholesalers getting excited earlier. And one of the other things you said when we were in Maine, I just keep referencing this conversation we had offline. You talked about, I don't even think it was what you said. I think it might've been Harpoon. Just the idea of telling a wholesaler that you are investing in the brand or there is a rebrand coming and they get excited by that signal. I think that's gonna be valuable for other folks to hear. Can you talk about that and how that dynamic changed? I think something we hear regularly, especially for folks who've been doing it 10, 15, 20 years is it was kind of like an old marriage that the distributor is not excited, the thrill is gone.

27:15Rob Day: So what do you do to bring that spark back? Like it or not, distributors are independent businesses and they get to execute against their own priorities and goals. And it should be. That's not a knock on the business model. They leave your meetings and have to go put your priorities and your goals and your story into a munisive set of priorities, goals. and if you can't respect and understand that, you're going to have a really hard time working through distribution. You're not always the most exciting thing and it's nice to have a very productive meeting and feel good and when they go compare that to everything else they have to work on for the year, you're going to net out somewhere on that list.

27:59If they believe you should be focused on your flagship, which helps them with efficiencies and truck moving and a lot of their goals and you come to the table with zero attention on the flagship and a bunch of new SKUs to distract and confuse them. They might like the beers. They might like the energy in the meeting. When that goes into the system of comparing priorities, goals, and strategy, it may not line up with what they want to accomplish. So just walking in saying, this is our most important thing and we think you believe the same and here's what we're putting into it. Usually what we leave that meeting with is, finally, that's what we've been saying all along.

28:36And that's, you take it how you want. I think that's great to hear. The idea of getting alignment throughout three tiers is really hard, especially when you're starting with the consumer in mind, you could arguably add a fourth tier for a marketer. So we really have to focus on that alignment and make sure that, you know, there's nothing behind the curtain when they leave the room. Focus is clear and they agree with what we're trying to do. So yes, that conversation we had was around Harpoon specifically, but the same mechanism was in place for Wachusett. I said people left that meeting energized and thankful that we were cutting the long tail of items and focusing on blueberry where they knew they could get some energy and achieve their own goals.

29:17So it plays out consistently across the board and I think that will be a sort of forever model. For other regional breweries that are listening, particularly legacy brands of folks that have some history behind them, are there uncomfortable questions they need to ask themselves before they even consider a rebrand? Is there one thing that jumps to mind? It's hard to focus on one thing, but where I always start this conversation is a very big why. Why do consumers give a shit about you? Period. And I put emphasis on you. So a lot of people can launch a lot of SKUs, do a lot of things. Why should they care that you're doing it?

29:58What makes you special? What makes you unique? What makes you a part of their lives? Why does that matter? And a lot of people talk about the exercise of five whys. I find it valuable. The first why is rarely the right truth. You have to keep asking until you get to a real core truth that you can build on. That arguably leads to the moment where you might discover a disconnect between what you think your why should be when you really dig down and what you're actually doing every day. That's the big red flag. Rebrand is in the works. And you need to get after it because if your core mission, your core why is not aligned with everything you're doing downstream, you're just creating noise and it won't last.

30:47It's probably already in negative declines. I would imagine if that's the case. Now, if you're closer to your core truth and you're delivering a little bit on it, you're probably in the refresh territory versus a rebrand, but it's fundamentally important that the first thing you understand is why you matter in your consumer's lives. And then that hard, uncomfortable question, if you were to step back and take your emotion out of it, are you delivering on that? Can you honestly say you're doing all the right things in design, marketing, and product to deliver on that why? And that's where an outside voice is really helpful.

31:24Detaching yourself from the emotion is is really hard for a lot of people. And if you can trust somebody else to tell you the honest truth, then that's where you need to go. Consider the same thing, you know, flaws within humans. Your friends might tell you everything's great. Like, you're doing great. You look great. You're thriving. Your best friend's going to tell you that you need some work. Like, let's be honest. Good friends? Yeah, you're doing great. High five. Let's go party. Best friends tell you it's time for some work and that's uh that's sort of the uncomfortable questions that you could derive from

32:00Rob Day: here you need someone that talks to you regularly it is uh yeah like every brand needs that there's bullying you bully beat you up and fat shaving if you can withstand the bullying then you must have something foundationally strong if it starts to put you off your mark then yeah all right yeah i don't know go sell something else don't make exactly uh we've spent the entire episode talking about this. So maybe an obvious point, but let's ask it anyway. If Wachusett had not gone through this reset, where would the brand be today? I think the declines would have continued. It was hitting a volume that was relatively steady state.

32:40So it wouldn't have declined at the 23, 24 % level. That's just not mathematically logical. But I think the declines would have continued and, you know, who knows where the whole portfolio ends up with no rebrand. But suffice to say, it couldn't have survived that slew of competition that's come out since in our against our flagship. And we wouldn't be talking with this much optimism. Now, we'd probably be still saying, you know, what do we do with this brand? And I think that's, you know, seeing the But the roll-ups and partnerships across craft beer, it's such a fundamentally important thing to do is you can get your back end straight and buy ingredients more efficiently.

33:27But if brands are in decline, cleaning up the back end is only going to save so much. You still need to do the hard work to change the tide on the front end. And that's a really key step. Saving on costs is not going to lead to growth. it's going to sure up your profitability, which you absolutely should be doing. But I think we would have probably been drifting into irrelevance over a long, slow death if we didn't take action.

33:55Rob Day: Probably be, yeah, selling off eventually anyway, I imagine. I think that Blueberry was trending for, we saw it a lot in our work for the year leading up to you guys. So the question is, specifically with all the competition that you saw, do you think, and I know we're kind of making this up, but do you think that a lot of that was driven by the success that you guys were having and the reinvestment in your brand? Or was it also just that like blueberries, like the flavor of the year? I mean, do you, did you have any sense of that? Yeah, I, I wrote, uh, not too long ago that I do think blueberry was part, part of that story for the year.

34:34It was, you know, sort of the flavor of the year in terms of new product. Saw that pretty regularly felt that to be the case, but I think it just outside of beer too. it, which is why I note it more as it's a forever flavor. You're sort of like lime, lemon. There's certain flavors that are always here. That type of flavor will always perform. I think in our core market where we saw, you know, maybe even a higher uptick of blueberry products come to market, they're looking at the numbers and craft beer, for better or worse, is a monkey see, monkey do business. So IRI says this category is up. A lot of people say I need one too.

35:11whether they should or not. Again, that goes back to the why question I proposed earlier. But a lot of people jumped into the category over the past year. And I have to imagine some of them are seeing the turnaround, the numbers, the results, the excitement we share wholesalers. They're seeing our stuff everywhere. And that's good. Like that breeds competition and they're going to come for us. But they're going to get smaller pieces of the pie, in my opinion. And if they're not focused on it, it's not a priority for them. But it is for us. We're going to keep owning that space and we're not giving it up.

35:40Uh, so we'll see a lot more in a short period of time, and then people will reassess where it fits in their portfolio, just like we just didn't say, you know, is this enough volume to be chasing after a new skew? And that's, that's the normal cycle of a business with this many competitors and all sharing the same data.

35:58Rob Day: You said raspberry earlier. Is that, is that the next flavor? What's the next, what's the next? No, the next flavor is Blackberry. And we don't have that in what you said. We just launched a Blackberry under Smutty Nose, not to distract this conversation. I think the flavor of this year is Blackberry. You can check my LinkedIn. I wrote a mini prediction and put a calendar reminder to check myself at the end of the year and see how wrong I was. So I say this with infinite confidence and fully expect to be wrong in December. But if I'm not, then I'll pat myself. I missed the LinkedIn piece. Why Blackberry?

36:29Just a provocative flavor that's not been overdone yet. so it's both visually provocative flavor wise and you know if blueberries maximize blackberry just seems like a really fun place and you know as we're working on our own development i started seeing that the inklings get out there even over in the whiskey category some big launches of blackberry whiskey and when it's cross category that's usually my my sort of trend indicator yeah it's not i'm not sharing any secrets i already wrote it down and i've already launched my Blackberry beer. But Long Trail's had a steady Blackberry wheat for years, and it's seeing some increases as well.

37:12So I hope to be right at the end of the year, but I will gut check myself and publicly shame myself if I'm wrong.

37:18Rob Day: We're seeing a lot of raspberry in our beer and RTD work. We're seeing a lot of Yuzu. I think Yuzu is fancy and delicious and probably maybe expensive on the cog side, I'd imagine. So I don't know if that's going to take off. But what else are we and Cody from a hyper fad. I can't say mushrooms, but like mushrooms are in everything. Peach kind of came and I'm not going to say went because I think it's still doing okay, but I don't know if peach is the hot 2026 fruit flavor necessarily. Rob, we wasted your time there at the end. Thank you for humoring us. Just at the end? Yeah, for the last 35 minutes.

37:58Rob Day: Thank you. Thanks for making in time for this. Always good to catch up. It was good to talk shop up in Maine and we'll have you back on soon just to replace Cody and me as the host of the show. So thank you. Absolutely good to be here. Proud to be a friend of the show and the only friend of the show. We are the only, we always mess this up. Where, where do you want, what do you want people to do? What do you want them to go? Where do you want them to learn more? Go buy beer, all beer, my beer, other people's beer by beer. Thanks for listening to Beer Branding Trends. If you like what we're doing here, if you find this valuable, please rate and review us over on iTunes and head over to beerbrandingtrends.com to join more than 5 ,000 subscribers who receive our monthly email newsletter covering strategy, currents, and actionable advice from Kodo Design, a branding firm on the front lines of beer and beverage branding.

38:44Rob Day: Take care. We'll catch back up with you soon.

38:55Thank you.