With Tropical Hazy IPA, pFriem Reaches For a New Audience
Full Disclosure: pFriem Family Brewers is a sponsor of this site. This post was my idea and follows my angle on the topic, however, and grew out of a discussion I had with Josh Pfriem on an unrelated beer.
For decades, small breweries had an exposure challenge. People didn’t know what “craft beer” was, and breweries struggled to get them to try their beer. Things have changed. Craft beer has been around for decades, and people basically know what it is. Or at least, they know what slot it fits into: it’s strong and intense, complex and hard to penetrate, built for a certain kind of drinker. That drinker tends to be male, tends to be older, and tends to be White. The new challenge is figuring out how to reach people in different demographics who have never cottoned to craft beer.
One approach is offering a drink in a different category—cider, wine, canned cocktails, seltzers., and so on. Another approach is creating beer that might surprise and convert drinkers with flavors they’re looking for in other drinks. Earlier this year, pFriem took door number two and released Tropical Hazy IPA. On the surface, it fits in neatly with their color-coded six-pack designs, but it emerged from a process of thinking about how to reach those elusive customers. Brewers created a beer to appeal to a younger, more diverse audience, and the marketing team plans to go to unexpected places—for craft beer, anyway—to put it in the hands of potential new drinkers. Their approach in designing this beer offers a case study in a brewery trying to escape the “craft beer” trap.
pFriem’s usual process, typical for a craft brewery, starts in the brewhouse. Brewers have an idea and they begin exploring how to make the beer they have in mind. Later, the marketing team will figure out how to describe and position the beer. In the case of Tropical Hazy IPA, pFriem reversed the process and started with the audience they wanted to reach.
“A gateway beer, 25 years ago, was an amber ale,” Josh Pfriem told me as he described these conversations. “Young people today like fruity, tropical flavors. We wanted to lean into a beer that focused on those flavors.” They weren’t interested in getting into a different category like canned cocktails, though. In fact, the first thing Josh told me when we chatted about the beer was: “We have to be one of the largest breweries in the country making only beer.”
pFriem did some research to find out who their customer base was, and what their target customer looked like. I spoke to Michelle Humphrey, pFriem’s Marketing Manager about this. pFriem already does better with reaching women than the average craft brewery, which has a 70-30 male-female split. “Our brand actually has more of a female drinking audience, laround 60-40%.”
Where they struggle more is among younger drinkers. Part of that may be that they’re a more premium brand—although she pointed out that their beers were far from the most expensive, especially the six-pack brands like Pilsner and IPA. She thinks the disconnect has more to do with positioning. Young people, she said: “…don't care so much about the beer process. A lot of our marketing has been focused on the beer process, and people nerding out about the beer. Young people don't really care too much about that. They’re not necessarily super brand loyal, they don't care as much about the local artisan stuff.”
In other words, young drinkers are just not magnetized by precisely the story craft beer has been focused on telling for the last couple decades.
Hitting the Mark for Tropicality
In some ways, making a beer that fit into modern taste trends was the easiest part of pFriem’s journey. The brewery doesn’t specialize in hazy IPAs or have a reputation as a hazy house, but they have featured a hazy as one of their core offerings. “Hazy IPA is one of our largest brands, and our second-fastest growing-brand, after our Japanese Lager,” Josh told me. “We did a lot of research on styles that land really well with this demographic, and hazies popped up a lot, and ‘tropical’ came from that, too,” Michelle added.
Young Millennials and Gen Z are famously “promiscuous” in their alcohol preferences, shifting easily among categories. They’re influenced by wellness trends that tilt toward fruit and vegetables, electrolytes, and “functional” beverages. They’re especially into tropical fruits. According to research that tracks this stuff (it’s well-studied because the food industry has a lot riding on it), the hot flavors right now are passion fruit, mango, and yuzu. All of this lines up very well with where hazy IPAs live.
pFriem has also been experimenting with new ways to showcase tropical flavors, and the new Tropical Hazy IPA features a new terpene-based, fruit-derived product from Abstrax called Skyfarm. It accentuates the fruity, tropicality of the beer without getting away from the beer part of the beer.
“We really didn’t have these tools [like Abstrax Skyfarm] a couple years ago,” Josh said. “Last year we made a beer called Cosmic Guava West Coast IPA with a similar product [John I. Haas’ Euphorics line] and it won a bronze in the GABF. It gave us some experience working with these newer tools.” With Tropical Hazy IPA, they wanted to create something obviously different than their regular Hazy IPA so that they could target those new customers.
Connecting With a New Audience
As craft brewing matured, it got better at connecting its products to customers, both directly at breweries, and through distribution channels. But as Michelle pointed out, that also means beer stays within some well-worn tracks. I was curious how pFriem planned to put Tropical Hazy into potential new customers’ hands, and she admitted it was a challenge. But she also relayed a story that suggests some new approaches.
Rather than go to beer events, pFriem looked for places where they could find that demographic they were shooting for. Earlier this year, the brewery was one of the sponsors of a sauna festival in Milwaukie, the home of their new restaurant and pub.
“I set up our booth to feel welcoming, a you're-on-vacation kind of thing. I had these sunbed-type chairs with a little umbrella, and it had this very relaxing vibe. It worked out really well; people were sitting in the chairs pretty much the whole time. You could tell it was definitely not a beer-educated demographic, but there were people coming up saying, ‘That’s the best IPA I’ve ever had.’ In the end about two-thirds of what we sold was Tropical Hazy, and a third of it was Pilsner.”
Michelle doesn’t think a kitschy campaign, with leis and tiki themes, would work with Tropical Hazy. That approach might have worked with an older demographic, but today they need to be more understated. They may be marketing to a different demographic, but stay well within the pFriem brand. Michelle thinks putting marketing dollars into events and sponsorships like the sauna festival will connect bridge the gap and connect new customers to the brand.
Craft beer has bumped up against a volume ceiling in recent years, topping out at about 15% of the market. Hidden within that bad news is a pretty sparkly silver lining: it means there are a lot of potential customers out there if small breweries can find them and give them the beer they want to drink. pFriem is hoping Hazy Tropical fits the bill. We’ll have to check back in a year or two to see how it worked.