Brewbroker founders Ben Morgan-Smith (left) and and Toby Chantrell

 

BrewBroker is today unveiling a new online marketplace for the global brewing industry. It brings together those who want to brew beer enabling them to trade directly with breweries and suppliers on one platform, making beer production smarter, more accessible and more profitable.

After successfully raising £390,000 seed investment via crowdfunding last year, BrewBroker has signed up more than 85 industry suppliers, across the UK and Europe, including Brewhouse & Kitchen and Kegstar, and over 70 buyers, to bring the platform to market.

Whether a brewery, pub, restaurant, retailer or aspiring brewer, BrewBroker provides a solution connecting these businesses with a network of brewing, packaging and logistics partners at the click of a mouse.

The BrewBroker solution can work for breweries that need to scale up, to a start-up beer brand looking for a cost-effective route to market. Or bars, restaurants and retailers looking to source their own brand of beer to a beer lover wishing to create a one-off beer for an event.

Negotiating pricing, contracts and handling payments securely and transparently are all challenges that BrewBroker aims to solve.

Challenge

It was seeing the challenge of industry colleagues launching a new beer brand, and witnessing the difficulties of navigating the network of breweries and suppliers, that prompted co-founder, Toby Chantrell, to develop the BrewBroker marketplace. The team has since spent a year working with breweries and suppliers to build, test and bring the concept to market.

Co-founder Ben Morgan-Smith said: “Seeing first-hand the challenge of bringing a new beer to market, we could see there was a real need for a solution providing increased levels of access and demystifying the process of creating a beer brand.

“Our huge brewing industry currently has no way to easily communicate and trade within itself. From giant brewers at the top to the small craft and entrepreneur brewers in their infancy, there is no one place to go to expand or make their brewing dreams come true.”

The platform has a network of suppliers covering kegging, canning and bottling to design and labelling with plans to grow this to several hundred over the coming months. Suppliers are based throughout the UK and include Harbour Brewing CoHogs Back Brewery, Laine’s Brew CoBrewhouse & Kitchen and Kegstar, alongside international brewers based in France, Denmark, Spain and Croatia.

Since launching last year BrewBroker has already begun to build a network of buyers, ranging from start-up beer brands and established breweries through to a growing list of independently owned restaurant and pub groups, as well as consumers.

BrewBroker, will be showcasing its new online marketplace at Craft Beer Rising this week. The company will be on stand 165 and will be available to offer demos of the platform throughout the festival.

Case study

Sour Fingers is the first beer to be launched as a result of using the BrewBroker platform, moving from home brew to commercial production within six weeks.

Sour Fingers Brewing Co, co-founded by Sam Lloyd, saw BrewBroker as a one-stop shop solution to its business needs. It was a low-cost alternative to setting up its own brewery and, secondly, the support BrewBroker could provide from branding to marketing all the way through to getting to the right wholesalers and outlets for the beer.

Sour Fingers developed its recipe with UBREW and then worked with Brewhouse & Kitchen who brewed and bottled the Sour Fingers, with kegging services from Keg Star, and Label UK providing design and labelling.

Sam said: “Taking our product from home brew to commercial production within six weeks just wouldn’t have been possible without this online marketplace. It has allowed us to focus on delivering a great product while connecting us with the right suppliers at the right time.

“It was a low-cost alternative to setting up our own brewing business and took out the headache and logistical nightmare of pin-pointing suppliers who had the capacity and availability to meet our needs.”

Brewbroker

 


All content on Beer Today is free to access and always will be. If you would like to support the site with a donation, though — £5 a year would be brilliant — that will be very welcome and can be done via the PayPal donation button below. (You do not need to have a PayPal account). Many thanks!