Building a $50M+ Zero Alcohol Global Craft Beer Brand

How Andy Miller did it: Building a $50M+ Zero Alcohol Global Craft Beer Brand

A journalist summed up the launch better than Andy could: "you're launching a summer beer style, in the middle of winter, with an unknown brand, and it's non-alcoholic."

Andy Miller had come out of Young Henry's, one of Australia's most-loved craft breweries. A friend called him a few years later. The idea: do for non-alcoholic beer what craft did for the rest of the category — actually make it taste good, build a brand people wanted to be associated with, and lean into the cultural moment around drinking less rather than treating it as a clinical alternative. The first batches of the XPA were brewed in his co-founder's kitchen using longneck beer bottles and a domestic kettle. The launch happened during the thickest part of the pandemic. They were, in Andy's words, "shitting ourselves."

Brewing was classified an essential service in Australia, so they could keep going while everything else shut. But shops were closed, distribution was broken, and nobody had heard of them. Andy and the team wrapped cans in newspaper and hand-delivered them to retailers, then circled back two or three weeks later to ask what people thought. That's how Heaps Normal got its first listings. The lockdown also did something nobody predicted: it turned the country into a population of people who'd just discovered they were drinking too much. The category they were building was suddenly catching a tailwind nobody saw forming.

A few years later, Heaps Normal is the best-selling beer in some retail accounts — not the best-selling non-alc, but the best-selling beer, full stop. It's now distributed in California, ingrained in the Auckland community, and Robbie Williams is on the cap table. Andy's response when asked about Robbie's investment: "Robbie's a fan." The brand is B Corp certified and worth $50M+. Andy's most valuable lesson is the one nobody told him in time: start before you're ready.

What you'll hear

• Leaving Young Henry's — the path from a crowded craft category to a category that didn't exist yet
• Launching mid-pandemic — summer beer, winter launch, unknown brand, non-alcoholic. And it worked anyway.
• The kitchen-kettle MVP — first XPA batches brewed in longnecks, on a domestic kettle, before any commercial production
• Hand-delivered distribution — cans wrapped in newspaper, brought to retailers in person, followed up two weeks later
• Brand before product extension — why Heaps Normal looked, felt, and named itself like a fun beer brand first, and a non-alc brand second
• Robbie Williams calling — and what it took to be the brand a global artist wanted to put his name behind
• The B Corp choice — building impact into the legal entity, not into the marketing brief

Key claims from this episode

Chapters

Quotes from this episode

Themes Andy returns to

• Category creation through brand — Heaps Normal had to be a fun beer brand first; the non-alc was secondary
• Tailwinds you can't see while you're in them — lockdown re-shaped the relationship millions of people had with alcohol, and Heaps Normal was already there
• Hand-delivered distribution — newspaper-wrapped cans, in-person follow-up, no shortcuts in the early days
• Brewing as craft — kitchen kettle to commercial brewery; the product had to be genuinely good or the brand would fail
• Impact in the entity — B Corp from day one, not as a pivot or marketing layer
• Start before you're ready — the planning phase doesn't generate the unexpected possibilities; starting does