My 2 cents worth.
I know this is long, but you asked...
1. Advertising. While it would be nice, who is going to pay for it? As a hobbyist I would love to see mead made more mainstream but I’m not going to pay for advertising. The commercial mead makers I know aren’t making the kind of money to do it. Maybe if they all banded together and spent their advertising dollars as one?
2. Craft Brewing. Most craft brewers are already aware of mead at least. Expanding the number of craft brewers making mead is good and would be helpful, but Craft brewers will tend to make their own and not buy much commercially, I don’t see that making a big difference in a hurry. As to selling it I suspect that the type of person who likes to try different beers would be a good market, but because of cost and alcohol content of most mead it would have to be served and priced in quantities more comparable to wine then beer. (See # 4 for more thoughts about pubs)
3. Footwork – This is important if done correctly, especially for the individual mazer, but again it only makes for small incremental increases in sales overall. The better option for national recognition would be to look into different ideas for Guerrilla Marketing. I have a couple of books on it and there are some great ideas. Basically you have to come up with something that catches the eyes and attention of the general public, without spending much money. Perhaps as a group we could come up with some good ideas.
4. Brew Pub (and pubs in general) Opening a brew pub is a very different business from making mead (or beer), I helped a friend open his, while successful it was a lot of work and very little of that had to do with brewing the beer. Also a single mead based pub while possible a great business is strictly local and won’t do much for anyone outside of their client base.
Pubs in general - I’ve talked a good number of different pub owners here in the Los Angeles area about this. Several of them said they would be glad to try it, but doubted if it would be worth their while to keep it, and these are pubs that specialize in specialty micro brewed beers. The problem is to be cost effective for a pub, you have to keg it, bottling as you know adds a big cost to the system. This means pouring it from a tap at which point the public thinks of it as a beer and wants beer pricing instead of wine pricing. If you pour it from a bottle as with most wine, they don’t think it would sell at all, at least in bars that specialize in micro beers. The wine bars I’ve talked to say their clientele generally come in wanting something different in their kind of wine. Person A likes Chablis, person B likes Merlot, while they are fine with trying a new Chablis or Merlot, they generally won’t try a new Burgundy, let alone a mead.
Having said this though I do believe that getting into pubs and getting it accepted in pubs is critical if we are going to make any kind of mass inroad in the acceptance of Mead.
5. Partnership with a food product. I’m not sure which food product you would partner with, and in today’s market I would suspect that most major food producers would be leery of being paired with an alcoholic product, especially one that has no proven draw to enhance their sales. So the question would be how would you tie them together in the consumers mind without being tied to a specific product? Something like the Avocado growers here in California linking Guacamole with the Super bowl and beer? When the Super bowl is over, the association with beer lingers.
6. Mascot, gets back to the Guerrilla marketing idea.
If I was going to open a meadery here in Southern California here is what I would pursue.
1. Partnerships with the local specialty beer bars, you have to have an outlet where people can easily try your wares. This would include doing tastings at the bar regularly so that the patrons would have a chance to try it before buying it, along with any other gimmick I could think of.
2. Find locations where mead would be acceptable to start with and build a database of potential customers. Rabbits Foot has a perfect venue with the Renaissance Faires here in California. People form long lines to drink their mead. I’d do tastings and get everyone’s email address for mailings and special offers; I suspect you could build quite an impressive mailing list very quickly that way.
3. Become associated with some of the beer and wine of the month clubs
4. Talk Vicky and Oscar into doing the Mazers cup to L.A. and then renting a conference center and put together a food and mead expo. They do it very successfully here with wine. I’d have all the commercial meaderies there to show their products, and the local restaurants and specialty food suppliers all come and set up booths with the idea of showing how their products will work well with mead. I’d then make sure that all of the news channels and food channels here in LA covered it. If done in conjunction with the Mazers cup it would mean that the commercial meaderies were already here and a core group of people that understand mead to wander the floors answering questions. I’m not sure of the viability of this, but I suspect that if done right it would introduce Mead to a large number of people and you would make some money to boot.
5. A tie in with a T.V. show. This is the reason I’ve now done several tastings for people in the T.V. industry, with the hopes that one of them would think it was neat and write it into one of their scripts. Just imagine, all the meaderies in the country wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demand if say the cast of Friends had decided it was their latest favorite drink. Unfortunately to have this work, we would need to already have at least a limited supply chain set up. This would mean both the ability to go into the specialty wine/beer stores and buy it and have it on tap in at least some of the pubs.
Some of these would be a job for the local meadery, however some of it would work far better with as many meaderies as possible co-operating together to make it happen. Who and how is a different discussion.
If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading
Cheers
Jay
