The squeaky wheel always gets the grease in the beverage industry. On this 150th episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff interviews Sam Corbeil, founder of Brewmaster & Co-Founder of Sawdust City Brewing Co. As a relatively new brewery on the scene, Sawdust City has had to work hard to make a name for themselves among established favorites.

In this episode, we'll learn why making a good product alone is not enough- you must be obsessed with being seen and building genuine relationships within the industry. By implementing innovative marketing strategies and cultivating strong relationships, discover how Sawdust City Brewing Co. has risen to be one of the top craft breweries in Ontario.

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Surviving and Thriving in the Beverage Industry

Andrew Maff and Sam Corbeil

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Sam Corbeil

A local Muskokan, Sam left the comfortable bosom of cottage country in the winter of 2006 to learn the art of brewing. After travelling to Berlin, Germany to study at the VLB, he returned to Canada and began working at a number of Ontario craft breweries. Sam finally came home to Muskoka in 2014 to help start Sawdust City Brewing Company. Over the following decade, Sam’s beers have become almost as well known in the Canadian craft beer scene as his moustache. Little known fact ... Sam can recite pi to 43 decimal places. It's added little to his quality of life, but dang if it ain't a fun party trick!

00:00

You know, it was like basically stunt marketing, like he would do wild and crazy things, and I, and I liked that a lot. I like that approach. It seemed to fit what I like to do. So I just sort of adopted that same sort of approach.

00:22

And I want a good show,

00:29

damn it. Show,

00:29

an awesome yeah, archery and my dad said, Sister,

00:40

Marty archery and my dad said, Hello, Everyone, welcome

00:50

to another episode of the Econ show you.

00:59

Andrea,

01:08

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The ecom Show. I'm your host, Andrew MAFF, as always, and today I'm joined by the amazing Sam Corbett, who is the brewmaster and co founder over at sawdust City Brewing. Sam, how you doing, buddy? Ready for good job. Yeah,

01:22

great. Thanks for having me today. This is real fun. Love doing this stuff, so let's get down to it and start talking about sauce.

01:30

Yeah, I'm so excited to have you on the show. I'm a I'm a big, big brewery guy. I think I'm at probably one or two at least every weekend. And it was very interesting for us to kind of explore this, because we do a lot of work with what we refer to as, like restricted brands, so brands where it's kind of like there's certain things you can't do online, like the advertising and stuff like that. And so it's always a very interesting market. And so to be able to talk to you today, to kind of dig a little bit deeper into that is awesome. So I always like, start these off in the very kind of stereotypical manner, and just kind of give you a second here, let us know about, like, how you got started, where you've been, how you got into sawdust, and we'll let it. Take it from there.

02:11

Okay, well, I started my brewing adventure way back in 2006 I after a trip to Brussels with my wife and some friends, I decided that, after attending a beer festival there, that I enjoyed beer a lot more than I did my current job, which was working at an ad agency. So I left that and went to Germany to learn how to make beer. Came back in 2007 started working at Magnotta, and then moved on to Robert Simpson, which is now flying monkey. And then from there was at Mill Street, during some pretty strong, expansive years, there, uh, huge growth, you know, craft beer was just kicking off. That was about 2009 or 2008 to 2011 ish. And then from there, sawdust all the way out since then, so it's been, you know, 14 years here, that we just had our 10th anniversary at this physical location this past weekend.

03:10

Oh, congratulations. What? So getting into the brewery business is obviously very interesting, selling the beer online, which I definitely want to talk about in a second here, but the getting into the business in itself, tell me a little bit about like the struggle of being able to stand out. I know locally, it's one thing because you become like a landmark, but to be able to scale past that. How do you foresee that approach for

03:38

us? The biggest thing that you know a lot of times, timing is always very important. And when we started, we were we were like when I came back in 2006 there was only 35 breweries in all of Canada. And then by the time we started, there was still way less than 100 and now we're at almost 400 so we had a whole lot less competition back in 2011 when we were first burgeoning and beginning our and a lot of what I did was just try to talk louder than everybody else. I borrowed a lot of stuff from, you know, breweries in the states where it was all it was all about being bigger, bolder. Yeah, just rasher than the guy beside you. And that was sort of the our ethos at the time. We were just having fun, being making big beers, being as loud as we could. And then, you know, the beer market matured, and so did we. Along the way, we still do a lot of that stuff as a whole. There's 400 other people out there. So, you know, we sort of shifted away from being, you know, a little bit, let's say we were immature at the time, to being a little bit more about quality, focused and just, you know, you. We're talking about our product more than just being loud and over. There's an intervening 1314, years, we've proven that we have good quality, and we stick to that. And you know, one of our mottos is, we don't take we don't take ourselves seriously, but we take our beer real seriously and like, that's sort of what we live by. That's our emails here.

05:24

So, you know, the CPG space is really challenging, right? Because, like, typically, you know, we'll have someone on the show. They created, let's just stick to drinks for a second. They created some drink. They created a website. Got a little bit of traction. Then they go retail, they start looking at distributors, etc, in the brewery business, it's kind of the the opposite, right? You start off more or less on the retail side, and then you look for distributors to pretty much distribute locally, and then obviously in your direction now, where you're starting to sell online. So similar approach, just kind of flip flopped. What's been how do you kind of overcome that issue of people trying the beer. Because, obviously, coming into sawdust is self explanatory, but being able to get it into the hands of people that haven't visited before.

06:09

I mean, one of the things that was great about those early years in, you know, the the 2010s and as we moved from there was, there was a lot of craft beer festivals. So I literally just went everywhere, wherever I could. I would travel to beer festivals and attend those and try to make as big a splash as I could at those festivals, which is where that sort of bold brashness came from. And then from there, we did, you know, the first those first few years, what we did is we go to bars, we do tap takeovers, we'd have chef's dinners, anything that we could at those beer bars. And then we really focused on just being in those really niche beer environments, which allowed us to establish a lot of relationships, which we still hold today. Again, timing is a lot of things, and it was very important that we got in when we did, because, as you know, it allowed us to get from there then we moved to the LCBO, and being at the LCBO for this long at this point, we seem like a brand that's been around. It sounds silly that, you know, 14 years is a long time, but it is in craft beer years. Like we're like, oh geez, they could go back. Like I said before, where we were, there was less than 100 now there's 400 so there's a lot of, you know, new people still coming up to have to go through all that again, fighting against 400 people. When we didn't have to, we had way less to go against. But that's, you know, that's really the only way you could do it, was in every format. And we were talking about this, like how we got to selling online. Another thing, another opportunity was there was these prior to being able to buy online, there was these brew boxes that you could buy, these mail order online, available brew boxes that were catered and sent beer of the month. It was a beer of the Month Club, like a cheese of the Month Club. But it was very early days in this mail order beer stuff. And we took advantage of, like, everything we swung on, everything that we could to make sure that we got that product out there. So we started, I mean, before online sales or E commerce, it was just these beer the Month Club things. So we started there. And slowly, as those you know on in Ontario, we had some pretty draconian rules about how things are sold, and as those eased up, we were on the front lines getting into E commerce and selling online, which we had set up. We were one of the first breweries in Ontario to set it up prior to the pandemic. So we had this all lined up years in advance. So, like, like you said, getting your hands. How do you get it in the hands of people? Any which way you could.

08:49

So the the food and beverage space, obviously, is incredibly crowded, and the craft beer market, as you mentioned, over the past, what, like, 10 years, especially here in the States, and it sounds like also in Canada, is, like, it's ridiculous. I think there's like 15 breweries within probably, like a 10 minute drive of me right now, which might be how I picked this home. But so, like, the this your point of you know, you don't take yourself seriously, but you take the beer seriously. So you take your product seriously, which is fantastic. How do you, how do you position it so that you actually stand out from all the other beers, right? Because if you've got 400 beers across 400 breweries across Canada, everyone's probably making a good, you know, 10 plus beers at any given time. You can only, kind of, you know, splice a recipe so many different ways until you start to get a little creative and you start to get a little creative, and you start adding in different flavors and all this kind of stuff. So, like, what's been your approach from a product perspective, to help it stand out? So

09:47

at the beginning, it was doing those wild and crazy things. And, like, yeah, when I was in that beer school in in Germany, I was reading Sam caligones book, you know, bringing up a business, and it's a. Autobiography. Now, you know, it was like basically stunt marketing, like he would do wild and crazy things, and I, and I liked that a lot. I like that approach. It seemed to fit what I like to do. So I just sort of adopted that same sort of approach. And we did these crazy beers. And we had a beer called long, dark voyage to Uranus, which, you know, sort of stuck us out here, like, you know, in Ontario, we're pretty conservative people. We're not that loud. So having these different names and crazy things going on at the time was pretty new in the craft beer world in Ontario. So it allowed that allowed us to separate ourselves. And then we continue to do that for a while. We have these names that were really long and drawn out, and then we go do these tap takeovers, and we'd have 30 different beers and people like this was all very new. Now, if you take we're say, 510, years behind what the states were doing. So there was always like this. I could look to the US where these things were happening, and sort of see things and borrow some ideas. And we were excited and drawn by that that this huge craft beer scene, we'd go to the craft brewers conference in the States, and we'd be witness to, like, everything seemed bigger and bolder. So like, Why can't this be in Ontario? We're like, we have the ability to do this, so let's just do it. So our separation was through those big wild we did some beers that we went out to the forest and we foraged for wild yeast, and we let we had wild beers, and just seemed to this caught the eye of the CBC, and we ended up on a podcast in the CBC, and we were able to do this every just seemed that we lucked out with when we put ourselves out there, something happened, and we were able to take advantage of that and grow our name that way. And at the time, as everything was blowing up, we just sort of happened to luckily be there. And now, as we've matured as a company, and the craft brewing sort of industry here in Ontario has matured, we've able to settle into that, sort of like, oh, their statesman role, kind of, here's our Lone Pine IPA, which has been around, you know, so it's a standard. It's a West Coast style IPA, which is now not as popular because everything's hazy. It as it went down, like as Hey, as Westies went down, that brand actually came up because it became one of the only ones available to everybody all the time. So we've been able to cultivate that and just sort of create that. This brand has been around now for this long, and it's an old standard, and that's how now we've separated it that way, and we have to keep, you know, being we're not so big that we can't shift. And it's being nimble, and being able to sort of see those ups and downs in the industry and where we can fit ourselves. Yeah, it's,

12:49

it is very interesting, because I've, you know, I'd never really thought about it that way. But like, you know, you get the trends of, you know, IPAs, and then for a while there was, like, the doubles and the triples, and they were like, the super strong beers. And now, like, to your point, like, it's the hazies, and I'm like, sometimes I go to a brewery and I'm like, can I just get what I enjoy I've had for years, and they don't have it anymore. Because, like, No, everyone drinks this now be like, not me. So like, I understand, you know, having kind of the standards and sticking to them. So that does kind of bring me to, like, the online space, because I know, like, obviously some of the standards available there and all that stuff. So what made you finally start to go online? How did it work out in the beginning? Like, tell me a little bit about

13:29

that. So prior to, like, 2017 I don't think we were able to sell online beer in Ontario. It was not anything that was available to breweries. You could do it, like I said to this beer bottle. Those beer boxes. But as the rules lightened up 2018 we started to set up a beer club where you could get, you could sign up for a subscription and you would get two different beers every month through the calendar year. And we sort of set that up. And then I remember it was New Year's Day. Must have been maybe it was New Year's Day 2018 maybe that's what I'm getting at. And I was talking to our marketing guy at the time. I'm like, what if we just did a beer a week for the year to see how many people would sign up by able to give them something brand new every week for the entirety of the next year, which would have been 2019 I guess. And he's like, All right, let's do it. So we set up this thing. We call it the 52 pickup. And it was like, each each car, each beer, was a card. So you could collect 52 it just works out that 52 pickup, and there's 52 weeks in a year, so you could, there was like a little card on the bottom of every label, and we had 52 beers that we lined up through the year to make and produce and release, to see how many people we could get on for the subscription and build our online presence that way. And it worked. We did it. It was an absolutely crazy year in. Terms of, like, learning about, you know, products sell through and then building back, like having too much inventory before the next product comes along. We learned a lot. We learned mostly that we shouldn't do 52 different beers in the year, like standalone beers, like, I understand some breweries will release a beer a week, but a lot of times it's just a version of a beer that they did, and they say that's a different one. These were 52 standalone different beers with labels names, and, you know, the product life cycle wasn't enough for this thing to give enough room to breathe and live and expand. So a lot of those never came back. Some of them did, and we had some cheat codes in there. We would have, we had a bunch of like, can condition beers that we would do, like barrel aged stuff that we sort of set aside leading into it. So if we ever had a year where a beer wasn't ready, or a week that a beer wasn't ready, we could pull out this product that had already been packaged, that we were just aging, and be like, bam, okay, we have this one that gives us at least another week for that beer to be ready that we weren't quite ready for. But 52 it also put a lot of pressure on the marketing people to come up with labels timing like it was bonkers, and it worked, though, so we, you know, built that up. And, you know, looking back at it, that timing couldn't have been more perfect, because just coming out of 2019 it wasn't too soon into 2920 20, where covid hits and noone could go buy beer, and we're like, Hey, we're already set up online, order online, and we'll deliver right to your house. That allowed us to take advantage of that right away. And that's sort of where it peaked for the next year and a bit. But then as people started going back out the online stuff, and we just couldn't do that 52

16:41

that was, it's a cool idea, but I was like, that,

16:46

yeah, and like, we were backing up on products. So you'd have, like, you know, you have your sale velocity of a peak at a week or two, and that would be it. And then you like, how do you now we got another new beer? How does that old beer? How do we move through it? Yeah, it was, it was difficult. We had, like, we signed up a lot of people for the subscription, but not nearly enough to make up for that difference. Yeah. So it was, and it was kind of the Wild West. This was all still very new in Ontario, so we didn't have a lot of information to go on. We were it was the new shiny thing. So people could sign up online and get right to the door. And then as that was happening, it was also finding a trustworthy supplier to get that product out. So we tried some different delivery services. At the beginning, we ate the cost of delivery, which we quickly learned was not sustainable, and then we went through a phase where we would, we would use the Canada Post, but then they wouldn't. If you weren't there, they wouldn't leave the beer at your front door. You had to sign for it, and if you didn't, you had to drive now to the post office to get it. So that wasn't fulfilling, like gear to your front door. Then we signed up with another company that they did. They were great until, like, everybody joined and they they didn't have the capacity to continue. Orders started getting dropped and missed. So then, you know, we've gone through a number of different delivery services, and now there's a larger fee to it. So unless you're from a far flung place, online isn't as accessible. People are back to their normal buying, going out, visiting breweries, which is sort of why you set them up in the first place. But it's been a fun ride, and we've had some, you know, exciting times with the E commerce sort of world, and we're still riding it. It's just, it's just not as big as it was, and we have to find the next way to get it back.

18:41

Well, I mean, you know, to your point of the 52 pickup idea, like, that's a very fun, interesting way to do e commerce, especially for a brewery, right? Because, like, yeah, you have the flagship stuff, and if I want to have it and I don't have it near me, yeah, I might place that order, but it's probably few and far between. But having that like experience of something new every week, or anything like that is very interesting. Now, the other thing I feel like you could do to kind of reduce some of that would be to keep the same concept, but maybe you just ship it like once a month, but they get four or five of them at a time, and so they're all different. It reduced how frequently you're shipping stuff out. It would reduce. You still have to do 52 of them, which still sounds like a challenge, but like the is that kind of, like subscription, like experience model, still what you guys are trying to explore and expand on.

19:36

Oh yeah, we still have that. And we do, like, it was 52 but you would only get it at the end of the month, so you've got a box, you can do the three, six or 12 month experience. And what we would hope is like, you know, we really push it at Christmas time. Oh, yeah, hey, get your your uncle, your aunt, whoever in your family is beer box subscription. And then after three months they like it, they can re up or six or. They re up or they don't. A lot of the subscription base that we have now are still people that have done it every year and each month, like, I'll write a newsletter, I'll put in a little blurb about each beer. They get stickers they like. They're part of a club. We also put a glass in every year, so when you sign up, you get that year's version of glass, and the glass is always different every year. One year we had like, you know, a fancy glass. The next year we have a pint glass. Next year we had a sleeve. The next year we did a small glass, where we're like, you know, it's for sharing beers. Let's shrink it up and but they get different glasses, and it's branded, and, you know, gives you part of that exclusive club feeling we've tried all that stuff. We're still in that space. This year, we did a little bit more. We went back to some beers that we put in our vault that had been sort of aging for a while. And we're like, we've sort of put something there, like, you're gonna you're the only ones getting this. This isn't available to anybody else, but you guys. So there's that exclusivity. Back to it all of all sort of get and get them into that feeling like the beer club is special, and they're part of something unique. We send them. We had, like a you've got, like a key chain that you could put on sawdust city beer club member and all that stuff. And it's and it is fun, and we still like to do it. We just, I just feel like that. It's kind of like that sort of online has waned a bit as people go back to just visiting breweries and buying the product that they can get here, unless, like, we're 200 kilometers from Toronto. So if you don't want to drive here, we can get it to you in 48 hours, and it's at your door. You want beer for the weekend. Call us on Wednesday. It goes out Thursday at your house, Friday afternoon.

21:50

Yeah. I mean, look to your point, it's, you know, ever since, let's say, pretty much post like 2021 as covid really started to kind of dwindle, and everyone went back to normal, like, the E commerce space went a little bit while a lot of people got used to shopping online again. E commerce space really did go back to its old roots. Of, like, you've got to provide an experience. It's got to be something fun. It's got to be something cool. Otherwise, like, they can go up the road and get it, like, right away. So there's, there's got to be kind of that, that pull in now, it sounds like, you know, between the the experience that you're providing and the exclusivity element of it, like you're hitting all the marks, so the fact of the direction that it's going, and it's just consistently testing and figuring out what it is people like, and adjusting from there. But yeah, I mean, dude, Sam, this was awesome. I really appreciate you having you on the show. I don't want to take up too much your time. I know you got some awesome beers to make, so I'd love to give the opportunity to let her know where they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about sawdust. Well, you can go to

22:52

sawdustcitybeer.com Check us out online. We're on Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok. Actually, I don't know if we're on Tiktok. I just said that, but I don't know, white guy, I don't know, have any idea what Tiktok is, but I know we're on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, and you can always find us here in Muskoka, Ontario, Gravenhurst and Popeye, the brewery, and all the cool beer bars across that province. Yeah, beef, come by. Love to see you

23:21

here. Sam, appreciate it. Thanks for being on the show. Obviously, everyone that tuned in, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us. See you all next time,

23:40

Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to theecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm Show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, a full service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com Now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.