WILMINGTON — The Port City has a thriving craft beer scene. There’s a dozen breweries and more on the way – there’s plenty of beer, plenty of restaurants to serve it at and plenty of people to drink it.
So, what’s the problem?
Robert Ray, owner of Mellow Mushroom and Moe’s Original BBQ, said restaurants want to serve locally made beer – and their customers want to drink it – but that owners face logistical hurdles.
“When I started, I remember thinking, ‘why would I want to serve someone else’s beer in my restaurant?’ But, as the community grew, and I got to know these people, it opened my eyes, and now – damn – I want everyone’s beer in my restaurants,” Ray said. “But actually doing it is tricky. I know a lot of the local breweries, but that said, it’s a lot of phone calls, and lot of trying to figure out who has what and how much and when they can drop it off.”
Brewers face similar issues. Without distributors, it is sometimes difficult for brewers – especially small brewers – to get the word out to restaurants, Ray said.
“You take a place like New Anthem, they make an awesome beer, but they seem to never make the same beer twice. It’s not a big operation, it would be hard for them to reach out to every restaurant in town and let them know what’s going on,” Ray said.
Ray thought about the problem a lot, and eventually brought it up to John Cornelius, co-founder of Wide Open Tech.
“We’re friends, we both love beer, and we both kind of thought this was a real problem that we could fix,” Cornelius said.
Working with Ray, Cornelius expanded Wide Open Tech’s Brewfully app. The software already allows craft beer fans to see what batches area breweries are considering, in essence “investing” in a batch. The system launched with just a few batches, but now has dozens of batches for six Wilmington breweries.
The expanded app would connect restaurants – or other “resellers,” as Cornelius calls them, like bottle-shops and stores – with breweries. Ray said the system would allow restaurants like his to see what breweries have in stock, place orders and see what breweries are planning on next.”
“It’s a really good organizational tool for an industry that’s not necessarily known for being super organized,” Ray said. “It helps us, it helps them.”
Set to launch next week, Brewfully’s new service – “a B2B for the beer community, really,” Cornelius said – would act as an interface for brewers and sellers (you can check out the new site here). In the future, he said, he thinks the system would also be able to handle payment. For the time being, that’s complicated by strict ABC laws in North Carolina.
“We’ve got about 20 ‘re-sellers’ and pretty much all the breweries,” Cornelius said. “We’ve had a lot of really good feedback, about what we can actually do to help, and what we hope to do down the road.”
The future: increasing options
Right now, the system is set up around brewers and the beers they have available, but Ray said he hoped that one day restaurants would be able to place requests.
“That’s something we’ve thought about. You can’t really do that with a regular distributor, the system is too big, and you kind of take what they have. But with a local community, we hope we’ll be able to say, ‘hey, I really want a keg of Octoberfest. I mean, that’s the point of building a real beer city.”
Cornelius said he hopes the system will help the local beer scene grow, as well as to one day help local beers find their ways to other North Carolina cities.
“I think that’s something we can all get behind,” Cornelius said.
Reporter Benjamin Schachtman can be reached at ben@localvoicemedia.com, @pcdben on twitter, and (910) 538-2001.
