Now in its fourth year of support, Scuttlebutt Brewing has found an ingenious way to help support its local public radio station.
The promotion for the Everett, Washington brewery’s Transistor IPA includes a creative server training video along with a vinyl mini-LP beer coaster, which plays an original beer drinking song to help prompt consumers to try a Transistor IPA and help support the brewery’s effort to support the station. A total of 100 percent of the promotions net proceeds are benefiting KEXP-FM, a Puget Sound listener-supported station. The promotional effort also includes posters, a webpage, along with radio and social video content.
“We have always sought to be an authentic brand, by that I mean we don’t want some scripted narrative about who we are as a company and what our beer is about,” explained Scuttlebutt Business and Operations Manager, Doug Tiede. “What we are is an independent, family-owned Washington craft brewery. The Bannan family (the brewery’s founders and owners) has always been involved in charitable giving and never wanted to shine a light on that side of our business as a sales tactic.”
The Transistor project began in 2014. Tiede said they were underwriting KEXP for about a year prior to the Transistor IPA project. When they had heard that the station was going to lose an important funding mechanism for their “New Home” campaign, a conversation began on how the brewery could help.
“The idea was put out over lunch that we should see if we could help by brewing a beer for them,” Tiede said. Scuttlebutt is involved in local music, hosting live music featuring original artists at the brewery’s event space regularly so the fit with KEXP is and was a natural one for them, he said.
After the initial call to see if they were interested, it happened very quickly. The first conversation was in late March ’14 and they launched the beer in September ’14.
“We decided early on it would be an IPA, and based the recipe on an experimental IPA we had done a few months prior,” Tiede said. “While we had donated plenty of beer to non profits as fundraisers, we had not done a beer on this scale as a fundraiser before, so both parties were learning as we went.
“The management teams at each entity meshed really well and it happened very smoothly. Looking back it’s amazing that it went so easily.”
Tiede said the relationship with KEXP is rooted in supporting community and promoting quality and that is what they want to communicate with the project, and what they hope to get across to new customers.
“Ultimately I think the success and longevity of the project is due to the like minded leadership at KEXP and Scuttlebutt working well together,” Tiede said. “There’s never been any static or discord, and we naturally agree on how we want to go about our work.”
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