By Andy Young
Gold Coast brewers Black Hops have launched a crowd funding campaign on the Pozible website, to help fund the opening of its new brewery.
Black Hops was established in 2014 by three friends, Michael McGovern, Dan Norris and Eddie Oldfield and McGovern told TheShout that the trio have already raised most of the money for the new brewery themselves and that the Pozible campaign will help them to release bottled beers.
"We've been planning to open a brewery on the Gold Coast for just over 12 months now, we've raised a lot of the money ourselves and have bought all of our equipment and we've secured a site," McGovern told TheShout.
"We are looking to do this crowd funding campaign just to raise a few of the extra funds needed to get the doors open. Plus, also it will allow us to do bottling from day one. So one of the major rewards for the campaign is access to our first batch of beer, which will go into bottles; and that will be the Beach House, which is an Australian saison beer.
"The $10,000 will allow us to deliver the rewards, allow us to bottle the beer and allow us to get the doors open. We do have excess beer available, so we could potentially raise a lot more than that, depending on how popular the campaign is."
The campaign also has a number of other rewards including t-shirts, a book that the trio have been writing about how to start a craft brewery on a budget and even corporate events.
The brewers are hoping to raise $10,000 in four weeks, although they have set themselves the challenging target of reaching half of that amount in the first 24 hours.
"Part of our personal goal is to raise half [of the $10,000] today, which is quite ambitious. Pozible told us that if we can raise 30 per cent of the goal in the first day, they'll back us and promote us on their website. They said 30 per cent, but we've decided to set our goal a bit higher and push for 50 per cent on the first day," McGovern said.
It's an ambitious push that reflects the nature of the trio. "Eddie, Dan and I have been mates for years and years. And when we get our heads around something we usually just go at it 100 per cent and often we can look back and say 'holy shit, how did we get here?'."
That ambition was highlighted last year when Black Hops were approached by video game producer Activision to create a beer for the Australian launch of the Call of Duty: Black Ops III game.
The first batch of beer will be brewed in March and will be bottled on-site at the Gold Coast. The trio chose to go with the Beach House saison beer as it has been far and away their number one seller. "It's been received really well," McGovern said, "and it was just an obvious choice for us to be the first beer we put into bottles."
The Pozible campaign has launched today, with details on the campaign and rewards available on the Pozible website.