The Obligatory Video:

Look, we have a video on the internet, must be legit!

What are we doing?

The Western Ridge Brewing Collective has a small batch brewery focussed on using Barossa grown ingredients in small batches of beer.  Because this all goes into keg for about 5 venues, you have probably never seen or tasted it.  We want this to change. 

We are planning to bottle or put into stainless steel growlers the majority of the output from our small batch brewery with a view to getting it into good Independent bottle shops all around Australia.  To do this we need your help to pay for label approvals, bottle stocks and more storage for our locally grown hops so we can pace production throughout the year.

Pick a pledge to the right and we will use your support to scale up our bottling of small batch, barossa sourced beer to reach a wider audience of drinkers.  You, for one. 

The Pledges:

You can get beer, merch, access to our launch party or one of several events.

You can also force us to change our business plan make Galaxy Warrior Mosaic part of our core range and, if you are planning to start a small brewery of your own, help us increase fermenter capacity in return for 12 free batches of beer.

Want multiple pledges?  

We will have a backer only pre-only merch store with some tasty discounts for you.

Want to add founders club, a VIP ticket or any earlier tier?  just increase your pledge by the appropriate value and tell us.  We will lock you in even if we meet the limit for that tier with direct pledges because we think you are awesome!

Go on, pledge, right now, you know you want to.  They are just over here >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

The Team:

We are a group of four, soon to be five, owner brewers dedicated to making real beer from real ingredients without extra processing or additives.  

On the left is Alex Marschall... Our main hop farmer, bar owner, sausage dog enthusiast and brewer of a wide range of beers from light fruit sours to our hefty Vox Populi rye IPA.  Also the only one who owns a razor apparently.

Then Olexij Straschko... Musician, Gardener, Wrangler of Hop Rhyzomes and brewer of complex, sometimes crazy but always smooth and balanced beers.  Genuinely the most helpful and positive person we know.

Then David Henderson... some guy, everything you need to know about him can be inferred from that video.  He also knows a little bit about brewing.

On the right is Tim Hardy... Our emergency hop farmer, winemaker(ish), cellar hand, impressively bearded brewer of British and Scottish inspired ales.

And soon, The Fifth Brewer...  Not yet on board, there is room in our business for one more brewer and you will meet them soon.

Follow our updates to learn more about us and our ethos.

The History:

Western Ridge Brewing was born in Greenock on the edge of the Barossa Valley. In a shed behind a modest house down one of the back streets.  The thrilling tale of adventure, heartache, joy, defeat and victory is actually not really any of those things and will also be revealed in our updates; so follow this project to get to know us.

Also Pledge, please, we will really appreciate it!.

Legals:

SA Liquor License No. 50819857

Beer cannot be shipped outside of Australia as a reward, so please limit yourself to merch only tiers if you are overseas.

It is an offence to supply beer to people under 18, we will check or an ID will be required on delivery; we can't deliver to PO Boxes because stupid laws.  

(As someone who lives in a town with no mail delivery only PO boxes, I apologise because I know how annoying this rule is)

Any beer will be limited to the range currently in production or scheduled for production unless specifically noted in the reward description.

Our budget breaks down like this...

More than 2/3 of your pledges will go to delivering your rewards.  The balance will be used to lay in the minimum orders of packaging, get approved labels for each state and increase our capacity to properly store hops from our harvest so we can make and bottle local hop beers all year round to keep you thirsty folks satisfied.

If we have more than expected interest in our major events or we shoot way past our target, the proportion used for reward fulfillment will drop and extra funds will be directed to scaling up production more rapidly to get even more beer out there, to add some core range beers in can and then to fund moving into our own cellar door.

None of the pozible money will be used to pay dividends to shareholders, directors fees or build cash reserves; it will all be spent increasing our capacity to deliver bottled beer to you from our own brewhouse.

The two exceptions to this broad budget are the most expensive tiers:

The Galaxy Warrior Mosaic pledge will have all of its funds less Pozible fees used to secure cans, cartons and production to deliver that pledge.

The Fermenter pledge will have over 90% of its funds used to deliver the fermenter and the beer, the balance will be for contingencies and the Pozible fees.

Fortunately all of the merchandise rewards are being produced by established and mostly local SA businesses as well as utilising our existing brewery capacity, so there are no challenges in fulfilling the rewards you have pledged for.

Our challenges are related to achieving our business goals and increasing the availability of our product outside of local independent venues.

As a small brewery, we face numerous challenges; like all small business our cashflow is lumpy and can be unreliable.

We address this by maintaining a strong balance sheet with owner/brewer funds while we stabilise our cashflow.  

The most critical obstacle for small breweries is market access, with the two major brewers plus and Coopers limiting access to tap points and our small packaged volume limiting access to the major bottleshop chains.  

The main challenge is in scaling up packaged beer to reaching broader markets outside of the Barossa and Adelaide, especially with recent changes to excise law reducing the viability of third party growler taps.  

Whilst we have a direct sales presence at local events and markets, and several key bottleshops in Barossa and Adelaide, we don't yet have a cellar door site and, without this successful pozible campaign, lack the resources to scale up packaged production to increase that reach.

The final challenge is in securing contract space for canned batches which will limit our ability to reach key interstate bottleshops considering changes to tax impacting growlers.

This pozible campaign and the establishment of our own cellar door outlet are the key steps to overcome these challenges.

So, in case we have not asked enough, pick a pledge to the right please :)