The journey has been long, sometimes unpredictable, and full of social interactions that have taught us about what people want.
First, We Found a Problem Nobody Was Fixing
Back in 2014, we both would travel several times a year and wanted to know what craft liquid producers were near where we visited. So we did something about it the following year after months of planning. Penultimate Brews was founded in 2015. We got some press out of it and then presented Chicagos.Beer (our first product) at Collision Conference in April 2016.
Next, We Had to Grow & Expand
It quickly became apparent after our ALPHA Startup experience in New Orleans that we needed to expand beyond just the Chicago area in order to capture the attention of craft beer drinkers. “When are you coming to X state?!” was a reoccurring question for weeks afterward.
We rebranded the project as BreweryFinder.org in mid-2016 and expanded our listings to cover breweries throughout the midwest. This allowed us to refine the product and focus on the future.
The BreweryFinder.org project listings covered all of the United States and Canada by early-2018. We continued networking with breweries, beer bloggers, craft beer distributors, and meet with celebrities in the craft beer world.
When Joel got a chance to sit down with Jim Koch of Samuel Adams and tell him about the BreweryFinder.org project his response was “You’re doing God’s work.” We took that as a blessing of sorts from one of the originals in the American craft beer game.
The Beer Community
Joel Gratcyk and Jeremy Hylen were guests on the “Meet My Friends” podcast (video linked above) with Doug Zeigler (Scotchfully Yours) and Greg Washington (Daddy Porter) in April 2020.
Beer is nothing without the community surrounding it. It is those relationships that drive everything inside and outside of the brewery. We like to stay involved with those who know it, make it, and drink it. This helps with keeping our sites up-to-date because we can use that network after investing so much in it.
Participating in the community of craft beer for us involves volunteering, education, home brewing, marketing, and consumption. Jeremy and Joel, our co-founders, are involved in each of these areas. Not only as a way to have fun, but to also keep tabs on what is going on in the industry and where it is headed in the future.
This is a 360° video segment from the “Smells Like Bean Spirit” by Mikerphone Brewingtasting episode of The Tap Takeover Podcast with Kyle from 1840 Brewing, and our co-founder Joel in Milwaukee, WI on a cool November evening in 2018.
Joel presented at the Beer Bloggers Conference in 2018 on a topic helpful to those in attendance and directly related to our BreweryFinder.org project. 360° photography at breweries and why every beer blogger should have a 360° camera. It boils down to this… We want to see virtual tours of every brewery on our site and we can’t do it alone.
Launching Our Second Product
On April 2, 2018, we launched Brewery.Work. It’s a streamlined jobs site for posting brewery and brewery-related jobs that are up for 30 days and automatically removed. Over the last yer we’ve sent out dozens of weekly emails, featured hundreds of jobs, and had thousands of job seekers visit our site and online jobs groups.
Moving Forward
We’ve got all sorts of plans for the future of Penultimate Brews, but need funding to make a serious attempt as completing them. Have questions? Let us know and we’ll be glad to get a conversation started online or at your local brewery. Cheers!