Crowdsourcing To Buy A Beer Company

Daniel Neville

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across probably one of the most ambitious crowdsourcing projects I have seen so far. Two ad agencies, The Ad Store & Forza Migliozzi, have joined forces to try and bring together a crowd in order to raise $300 million to by the American beer company Pabst Brewing Co.

Apparently the ownership of the brewery was passed over to a non profit organisation when its owner passes away last year. This is, according to American tax laws, technically not allowed (I have to admit a non profit owning a for profit company is a bit strange) so they are currently looking for a buyer. This is where buyabeercompany.com steps into the picture...

The concept is simple. Fans of the Pabst Brewing company (you have to be of legal age) can go to the website and pledge between $5 and $250,000 towards the acquisition of the company. You don’t actually give money until they reach their goal of $300 million - they currently still have just over $116 million to go. If the sale goes through, you will receive a certificate "suitable for framing" which is nice as well as "enough beer to match their pledge" - I wonder how they are going to work that one out!

The site gives four different pledge levels to choose from, right from the $5 "Bottle Membership" to the $250,000 "BrewMeister" pledge. The site is very skint on details of how this will actually work if the sales go though but one would imagine the more you have pledged the higher level of influence you will have in the managing of the company.

As you can see the project seems to have taken off very well and there has already been over $250 million pledged making it a real possibility that the 165 year old brewery (the third largest in the US) will become community owned - this is definitely something we will be keeping an eye on!

If you are interested there is a very interesting interview with Brian Flatow the head of the Ad Store on his involvement in the project here.