About BrewFans.com

BrewFans.com is a tool to help brewers know where their most loyal fans want their beer. It is a simple idea, but not an easy idea to implement, especially in the state of Texas. BrewFans was started by Brandon Turman and Jonathon Lunardi.

Jonathon and Brandon have been in the craft beer industry for close to four years now and run product strategy, marketing, and business development. Brandon lives in Dallas, Texas and Jonathon Lunardi is located in the Washington DC area.

Brandon and Jonathon met in college at the University of Oklahoma where their beer drinking pallets were limited to Natty Light and whatever the local gas station had on special at the time. As Brandon and Jonathon graduated from college, they began entering the professional world and the professional world of more sophisticated beer drinking.

Both Jonathon and Brandon have been to the past three Craft Brewer Conference’s and the past two SAVOR events and from their research they created BreweryFans.com.

BreweryFans.com was harder to pull off than originally thought. The premise of this site was to answer the age old question – “Where can I find that beer?”. We worked with over 30 breweries, nano to large scale, but the problem lay within the distribution tier of the 3 tier system.

Distributors have bad data and the most accurate data actually comes from the bars or store managers themselves. We worked with Joe Tucker at RateBeer.com who already had a loyal following of bar managers updating their beer lists and came up with the reverse concept – “tell me where you want my beer” for BrewFans and then we plan to tap into already existing beer list databases from RateBeer, BeerAdvocate, and BeerMenus.

The craft beer industry doesn’t need another beer listing websites we determined.

BrewFans.com is much different. It is easy to use and simple to register. It is also connecting to SMS text messaging and email notifications to alert users when their beer votes have been fulfilled. The site was designed to aggregate demand for a specific beer in a specific location. We believe the tools will be most valuable to small and medium sized breweries as these breweries have smaller staffs and must grow through word of mouth locally usually.

The question we try and answer for a brewery is “Are you growing the smartest way you could?”. Probably not. That is where our software comes in. A brewery can simply tell every person that knows them, drinks their beer, and has built a relationship with the brewery to go onto BrewFans, find their beer, and then tell the brewery which bar or store they want their beer to be available at.

The tricky part is how to integrate distribution rules and that is why we need to partner with each brewery and only offer the service to Texas and Oklahoma breweries in the first few months of launch.

Big thanks go out to Larry Lunardi for funding most of the project and to all of our amazing and awesome wives for dealing with all the much needed market research and beer drinking! We love you ladies!