A Melbourne start-up has launched the world’s first crowd sourced and crowd funded brewery.
Wisdom Brewing allows craft beer enthusiasts to crowd fund production of one beer and hands over all decisions to the ‘wisdom of the crowds’.
Wisdom Brewing was founded by Andrew Meek, who believes Melbourne is a logical place to begin operations.
“Melbourne has a very healthy craft beer scene and an emerging tech scene as well. It’s also my home town,” he said.
Crowd funders are being asked to contribute $200 to the temporarily titled ‘Melbourne Brew One’. They then contribute their ideas and opinions on every aspect of the beer, from style to label design, and most likely a new name. The resulting beer will go on sale in bars and bottle shops across Melbourne, with a share of the profits being returned to the crowd funders.
“So far we have been raising money through our own website. However we are putting together a Pozible campaign at the moment. So far we have raised over $3,000 and we expect to raise more once our Pozible campaign and other promotions get into full swing,” Meek told Beer & Brewer.
“We have enough capital to get the first brew off the ground. However to succeed with the vision that we are looking for, we need a reasonable number of people to get involved.”
While the funding is a key element to the brewery’s success, it is the pooling of ideas that Meek is most passionate about.
“Crowd funding is probably the smallest aspect of Wisdom Brewing. What we are really excited about is the crowd-sourcing of ideas. We want the people funding our brews to be really involved. We aim to give a taste of micro-brewery ownership, where they put in their ideas about the style of beer, the name, the label design and even the price,” he said.
“We would like to have at least 50 people involved for our first Melbourne brew and are on the way to achieving this.”
Meek plans to craft ‘Melbourne Brew One’ at Cavalier and while crowd funders can be located anywhere, there will be local events attached to each brew.
“I’ve been a fan of their (Cavalier) beer for a while. And I love Kaiju! Beer, which was until recently brewed at Cavalier. I think that is perfect evidence that contract brewing at Cavalier can produce amazing results,” Meek said.
“Crowd funders can be located anywhere. However having said that, each brew will have lots of events and chances to get involved in the brewing process. This requires being in Melbourne for our first brew. So while we expect most people to be local, we will welcome crowd funding from anywhere in the world. We already have a few people from Europe involved in our first brew! Craft beer love knows no geographical boundaries.”
To find out more about Wisdom Brewing’s crowd funding campaign, click here.