When everything was sold across the bar for New Glory, founder Julien Lux said they could just make anything. Now with more than a dozen wholesalers throughout Northern California, the Sacramento brewery has to be mindful of what they are brewing in large quantities.
Since it was early March of 2023 at the time of this interview, Lux used the brewery’s Dry Irish Stout as an example.
“Our distributors are not going to want to bring that into the warehouses,” he said. “That goes also with something like the Pastry Stout. Those styles to me are beer that are mostly meant for your taproom, and maybe some very small specialty accounts that are just very specialized on a unique taplist.
“It’s not a beer that we’re going to be able to sell to a lot of bars and restaurants out there. Most people go to a restaurant, they’re not going to order a pasty stout to go with their dinners. It’s more a beer that’s more fitted for here at the taproom. And I think most are not gonna go to Costco or wherever and buy the Pasty Stout there. Even if Costco had it, I think to them it kind of kills that romance of it a bit. They want to come and get it straight from this source.”
From a focus on cores that can appease a vast majority of drinkers and help prop up the volume, New Glory also made it a central point to create a more uniform look for its products by working with Carpenter Collective to refresh the brand’s more mature branding.
“It was a pretty drastic change,” Lux said but added it was needed. On the same level of us brewing whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted (when we started), the labels looked drastically different from one brand to the other.”
With just geometric shapes and abstract kinds of patterns, the cans were all really eye-catching, Brian said, but it wasn’t something most people outside of craft beer may have been looking for.
READ MORE: Consumer Strategies That Propelled Lux to Move New Glory Ahead
“It was just whatever cool art we could come up with and slap on the label,” Lux said. “There wasn’t a lot of uniformity or cohesion. We didn’t have a logo on the front of that. It was kind of like one of those things where we thought it was cool. The ‘if you know, you know,’ kind of thing. It had the little star that we’ve always had on the front, but you had to actually turn the label around to see the New Glory logo. So there was never anything that said New Glory on the front of the can.
“If we were gonna go after that grocery store, and that more of that, I call it ‘Gen Pop’ consumer, I think it was important for us to have a more cohesive branding, at least on the core brands. So when they were on the shelf, you could tell they were all from New Glory. We thought going into a market segment that the consumer is not necessarily as informed as to the craft beer nerd, we thought it was important to have New Glory on the front of the can and for it to stand out.”
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