Read the full transcript below.
I'm Cary Prewitt, founder and chief gunslinger of Guns & Oil Beer.
01. Craft Beer for the Other Guy
Craft is really seen as a thing that's been started by hippies and was really in, you know, "blue cities" for lack of a better word, and you know, most people are going to work every day and hustling and trying to work for a living looked at the people that drank craft beer and went "these people do not represent me and who I am." And I feel we were one of the first that created a brand, and people went, "That brand identifies with me, it fits who I am, it fits my persona, and it's something I want to try and support."
02. A Gap in the Market
So when I started Guns & Oil, when I came up with the name and the vision and the idea, we didn't know what kind of beer we would release. I had spent a lot of time drinking German lagers and really didn't like the domestic lagers offered. And I didn't feel that there was a great middle point between you know, domestic beer, which was all "foreign owned," and craft beer, which, there were 30 breweries at the time and they were all IPA focused, so I went, "let's create the first poundable, more approachable lager," to where we could teach people to like craft beer by teaching them that you can make craft lagers and as a result if they liked that they could continue to dive into craft and learn what the whole emporium is all about.
03. Built on Core Values
You know, our brand is interesting because I was really conceptually coming up with what I wanted to do with it at the same time as I came up with the name to where it's like, okay there is this real gap here. There's not a great brand in America to me that really represented where we should be going as a country, and representing, like where we came from and making people realize what our core values are. One of our values whether you're going West, to work on the Gold Rush, or somebody coming to the East Coast for the first time due to the potato famine or anything, everybody came over here and worked their ass off and they had to earn it. That is what the American spirit is all about.
04. The Power of Authenticity
We have limited resources and at the end of the day, believe that if we focus on our core values and attracting an audience who believes in those, that it's going to resonate with them and we're going to be okay. You know, it's something that may take a while to build, but we expect between an audience that understands and believes in that, along with people who like lagers, which are, almost everybody that drinks beer, that we are going to be able to build this into something that is really successful.