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Selling Beer & Building Brands featuring Tom Delmont
Two weeks on from featuring a couple of the big winners from this year's Indies on the site and podcast just days before they took to the stage to collect their trophies, we found ourselves in the middle of breaking news once again this week.
Our guest is Tom Delmont, who many in the local beer industry – especially in Melbourne – will know very well. He was Mountain Goat's first sales rep, forcing his way into the role then helping put their beers into pubs and bottleshops all over the city and further afield before leaving when the brewery was sold to Asahi. He subsequently went on to create Fixation in partnership with the founders of Stone & Wood, helping fire the rise of IPA in Australia and picking up some major awards over the years.
He'd featured prominently in discussions around which early guests we'd like to invite onto the show. In part, this was because he's such a great communicator and has a wealth of insights to share on the industry as a whole, as well as specifically on how to sell beer and build brands. And it was also due to his long relationship with The Crafty Pint: Tom and wife Kate were the first people to introduce the site's founder to craft beer in Australia one Friday night at Mountain Goat back in 2008.
When we heard he was leaving Fixation a few weeks ago, that cemented our desire to bring him in early, making him the first guest to join us for the entire show, including our discussion of the week's news. This week we focused on festivals (on the back of Blobfish), the sale of the Lord Nelson, and the closure of Burnley's taproom.
Then, just hours after the interview had wrapped up, first Tom and later the Crafty team were informed that the Incubator – Fixation's brewpub in Collingwood – is to close. The seven-year lease is up soon and Lion has taken the decision not to renew, which means it will cease operating in the coming weeks.
They hadn't planned to announce the closure at this stage as they're still working through finding new roles for Incubator staff within the wider business, but heard Tom was on this week's show so gave us a heads-up. The Fixation brand and beers are to continue, but the brewpub will soon be another casualty of the current economic downturn.
The news doesn't impact the chat with Tom, however, which covers his career in beer from his pre-Goat days as an entomologist through to today, when he's working with carbon accounting platform Zevero. We talk about how to sell craft beer and maintain taps, independence, the importance of collaborations in reaching new audiences, being beermiscuous, dad craft, music and beer and much more besides.
As anyone who has met Tom will know, he's a fantastic storyteller and here draws upon two decades as a well-travelled member of the beer industry who, above all else, genuinely loves good beer more than pretty much anyone you'll ever meet.
You can find the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. Since last week, with a few episodes under our belt, we've also created a dedicated section for The Crafty Pint Podcast on the site, as well as on the homepage.
NB: Around 47 minutes in, you might pick up a slight buzzing sound coming and going. We're not sure what's caused this given we didn't pause or restart the recording before that point, but we'll attempt to find out what caused it before the next show...
Cheers!
We're keen to work with partners looking to reach new audiences and achieve their objectives in fun and creative ways. So, if you'd like to be part of the action, get in touch.
James Smith launched The Crafty Pint in 2010, two years after moving to Australia from the UK. He was taken to Mountain Goat within weeks of landing in Melbourne, joined their indoor cricket team, and is still navigating the rabbit hole that is craft beer to this day.
The beers that turned you on to good beer:
- Watching pints of McEwan's 80 Shilling settle when visiting family in Edinburgh.
- Pints of flat Bass from the jug at the Cap & Stocking in Kegworth.
- A first Paulaner Hefeweizen when working in Munich in 1998: “This smells of bananas!”
- Castle Rock Harvest Pale – how could a 3.8 percent ABV beer be so good? (It turns out it was an early example of the three Cs – Cascade, Centennial and Columbus – in an English bitter).
- Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA poured through hops at the Sunset Grill in Cambridge, MA, in the company of a man who turned out to be the Beer Nut (while we were both covering a double murder case at the time).
- Ordering a Mountain Goat Hightail on my first day as an Aussie resident as it was local and I’d never heard of it; “A dark Australian beer; well I never…”
- Murray’s Icon 2IPA at Beer DeLuxe Fed Square, recommended by a guy I’d not long known who's now the main man at Fixation, served by Mik Halse, now head of sales at Hawkers. How could an Australian beer smell as good as that?!?
You've got three beers to turn someone else on to good beer; what are they and why?
- Any really good, fresh and balanced West Coast style IPA. Punchy hop aromatics are the most obvious way to capture someone's attention and these IPAs, done well, present the key components in beer (if you're sticking to just water, malt, hops and yeast) in harmony yet with the volume turned up.
- Saison Dupont. Arguably a selfish choice here as I bloody love the broad saison style and dearly hope it will finally take hold in Australia one day. Given a choice, I'd probably crack one enlivened with Brettanomyces like Molly Rose Matilde for myself but, when it comes to turning on someone new, you've got to go with the classic.
- Rodenbach Caractère Rouge. Because if you don't enjoy or can't appreciate this beer, I'll never win you over. And because Filip, the fruit and wood specialist at Rodenbach that designed it, is a beautiful human.
The last beer you enjoyed:
Fixation IPA at The Incubator.
Three things that represent you:
- The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Golden Plains
NB All articles written by James in the first eight years of the site appear as By Crafty Pint. Today, that's used for collaborative efforts by the wider team.
