Your brewery’s biggest growth opportunity is hiding in your blind spot.

After studying hundreds of small breweries, I built a simple diagnostic tool to find what most owners miss. This quiz pinpoints the one area—like menu design, margins, or marketing—that can unlock your next phase of growth.

Takes 7-10 minutes. No signup required.

Discover Your Brewery’s #1 Growth Bottleneck

Ten minutes to clarity. Get a personalized snapshot of where revenue is leaking and the first move to fix it.

Diagnose

Pinpoint the core constraint across traffic, conversion, retention, margins, ops, brand, or distribution.

Benchmark

See how your numbers stack up to U.S. peers and top performers so you know what “good” looks like.

Action Step

Get the first, lowest-effort move to unlock growth—no fluff, no generic advice.

Find Out What's Holding You Back!

Fix One Thing First

It’s easy to fall into the pitfall of trying to solve everything at once.
But as Alex Hormozi and other growth strategists emphasize, the fastest path to lasting change is to pick one bottleneck, focus on it relentlessly, and move the needle there before tackling the next.

Pick the bottleneck: Use the quiz score: lowest‑scoring category = your focus.90‑day sprint: One KPI, one owner, weekly check‑ins. If it doesn’t move the KPI, it’s noise.Sequence, don’t stack: Traffic → Conversion → Retention → Margins → Ops → Brand → Distribution.

Built on Real Data, Not Guesswork

Every benchmark in your quiz is grounded in proven research from the leading voices in craft brewing, hospitality, and consumer behavior.

Industry & Trade Associations

Brewers Association → profit margins, revenue mixNBWA → distribution & wholesaler realities

Brewery & Hospitality Software

Brewers Association → profit margins, revenue mixNBWA → distribution & wholesaler realities

Market Research & Consulting

NielsenIQ → packaging & retail consumer behaviorGallup → team engagement impactBrightLocal → power of Google reviews

Industry Media

Craft Beer & Brewing → pour cost & mug clubsBrewbound → distributor strategies

About

Hi, I’m Joe Bennett.I’m a husband and dad to three amazing kids. For the past 7 years, I’ve worked a blue-collar job to support my family. At night, I’ve studied marketing, design, and business strategy with one goal in mind: helping small breweries grow.At first, I thought the answer was rebrands. But here’s what I found:
- Most breweries rebrand every 5 years, and the sales bump usually lasts only a few months.
- Sometimes it works (see Voodoo Ranger).
- Other times it barely helps, or even hurts (see Anchor Brewing, who rebranded, grew production 45%, but still closed within 2 years).That made me ask: what really drives lasting growth for breweries?The truth is, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all fix. But almost every brewery has one key bottleneck holding them back. Solve that, and you unlock the next wave of growth.That’s why I built this quiz.---Why This is Free
Right now, I’m proving this system in the real world. That means:
- Everything is 100% free. The quiz, the results, and my help.
- You’re not a “lead.” You’re helping shape a tool made for breweries like yours.
- If you’d like extra help putting your results into action or tailoring them to your brewery, I’d love to work with you, at no charge.---Breweries give communities life. If this quiz sparks even one useful idea for your taproom, then it’s doing its job.---A Note on Outreach
If you found this site through a cold email, I get it: that can feel unusual. But I’m a real person, not an agency blasting spam.I’m reaching out one by one to small breweries producing under 15,000 barrels a year, because that’s who this quiz is built for. If you don’t fit that, or if you’d rather not hear from me again, just reply “not interested” to the email and I’ll take you off my list right away.I’m building this tool brewery by brewery, and I’d be grateful for your feedback along the way.

How Voodoo Ranger Became an Icon (Without Competing on Price)

By 2016, New Belgium had a problem. IPA was booming, but their own flagship IPA—Ranger—was fading fast. It wasn’t that the beer was bad. It just didn’t stand out anymore.

So the company made a bold move. They didn’t try to polish Ranger. They buried it. In its place, they built Voodoo Ranger—a sub-brand with a new identity, a skeleton mascot, and a voice that dripped with sarcasm. It wasn’t just another beer on the shelf; it was a character with personality.

The rollout was loud. Skeletons on cans. Memes on social. Pirate ships at Comic-Con. And on the product side: big, high-ABV IPAs sold in 19.2-ounce stovepipes—the exact format buyers were already grabbing in convenience stores.

The bet paid off. Within a few years, Voodoo Ranger grew from an experiment into a growth engine. By 2022, Juice Force alone pulled in more than $30 million in sales in its first year. Today, half of the best-selling IPAs in some retail channels carry the Voodoo Ranger name.

Why Kill Ranger? The Sub-Brand Play

Sometimes the problem isn’t the beer—it’s the brand.

Ranger had run its course. Reviving it would’ve been like trying to convince people that a Camry could compete with a Mercedes. That’s why Toyota built Lexus in the late ’80s. Same company, different badge, new promise.

Coca-Cola plays the same game. Coke is the flagship, but it can’t stretch to every flavor or buyer. That’s why Sprite and Fanta exist. Each has its own voice, its own drinker, its own spot in culture.

Voodoo Ranger followed that exact playbook. New Belgium didn’t reinvent the IPA. They reinvented how it was sold and to whom it was sold. And that single choice gave them a new ladder to climb.

How to Design an Icon on Purpose

Voodoo Ranger worked because it wasn’t just packaging—it was a persona.

With agency Fact & Fiction, New Belgium gave the skeleton a voice. On Instagram, he wasn’t posting polished press releases. He was cracking jokes, riffing on memes, and speaking the way his buyers spoke. That made him more than a mascot. He became a cultural participant.

And then came the fan involvement. Vote Voodoo let drinkers pick the next IPA. Suddenly, every new release was a game—and every fan who voted became part of the story.

Formats Matter as Much as Flavor

Most breweries think of new beers first and packaging second. Voodoo Ranger flipped that script.

Their team leaned hard into 19.2-ounce singles and convenience stores. Why? Because that’s where their target buyer was already shopping. And they matched the format with the right product: bold, high-ABV IPAs that stood out next to Bud Light tallboys.

Juice Force became the breakout hit, pulling tens of millions in off-premise sales almost overnight. Not because it was the cheapest IPA. Not because it was the most expensive to brew. But because it was exactly what their new audience wanted, sold in exactly the way they wanted to buy it.

The Founder’s DNA Still Shows

If you zoom out, Voodoo Ranger doesn’t look like a fluke. It looks like an extension of the culture Kim Jordan and Jeff Lebesch set when they founded New Belgium.

Jordan’s people-first leadership and Lebesch’s curiosity—literally biking through Belgium with a notebook—gave the brewery a bias toward experimentation. That culture is why they didn’t cling to Ranger. It’s why their R&D team could take a niche hop innovation and spin it into a rotating IPA. And it’s why they had the guts to let a skeleton do the talking.

What They Didn’t Do (And You Shouldn’t Either)

  • They didn’t try to win by being cheaper. There’s no margin at the bottom.
  • They didn’t make the beer drastically more expensive to produce.
  • What they did was reframe the value: a new identity, a new buyer, new formats, and a new conversation.

Field Notes for Breweries Under 15k BBL

  1. Name the buyer first. If your flagship doesn’t fit, build a sub-brand with permission to evolve.
  2. Give your beer a character. Labels can’t tell jokes. Characters can.
  3. Sell where the buyer already shops. If it’s convenience stores, design for convenience stores.
  4. Make feedback part of the show. Rotators and votes aren’t gimmicks—they’re product-market fit engines.
  5. Protect margin with story, not discounts. Coke sells water with sugar at premium prices because of branding.
  6. Write for the feed, not the trade mag. If your drinker lives on TikTok, your brand has to perform there.

What Could Have Gone Wrong (And How They Avoided It)

  • Mascot fatigue? They kept the skeleton fresh with new outfits, stunts, and storylines.
  • Rotation confusion? They anchored with Imperial IPA and let rotators live on top, framed by fan voting.
  • Channel mismatch? They didn’t force distributors to make space in old spots. They won by going all-in where demand already existed—19.2s and C-store endcaps.

Closing Thought

Icons aren’t discovered. They’re designed—for a specific buyer, in a specific moment, on the shelves and screens that buyer already scans.

New Belgium didn’t out-brew the universe or out-cheap the competition. With Voodoo Ranger, they did something smarter: they out-relevanced the market.

Take the Brewery Diagnostic

Let’s Put It Into Practice

You’ve got your results — now let’s turn them into action.
If you’d like a deeper dive into your specific situation and a clear, focused plan for fixing your biggest constraint, we’d love to help.

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