With the change of seasons and the cooler months upon us, we’ve decided that now is the perfect time to raise a glass and toast to stouts and dark beers!
So, on July 20th, we’re bringing you a double restaurant winter event. A whole row of stouts at the Stout & Hops restaurant. Yes, 14 stouts in the same row at both restaurants on the same day, just one day.
We’ll call it the Stout Hops Tap Break, and we’ll call it the Power Break!
Go here to visit the BHII Tap Blackout Facebook blackout event and register your attendance.
If you’d rather come to our Burley headquarters, please register your attendance at this link.
See you soon!
The report shows that only 9% of consumers spend more blackout than $100 a week on craft beer, so only a few will spend $100 on a box. With an average weekly spend of $56, that’s a new RRP for our 16-pack of pale ales.
So far, the vast majority of customers blackout are buying 4 packs of dark hops. We wanted a format that would allow them to buy more than 4 units, but not stretch the budget too far. From a price perspective, the 16 packs match perfectly.
We got them from a local supplier via China, and had to order thousands at a time in order to get the price down to a reasonable level (under $2 per box). Going through China also meant waiting months to get the boxes.
We have now started using Carole Park Corrugated Products (a Visy company), which manufactures corrugated products locally and uses stamping technology to make the boxes. This makes the boxes much cheaper (about 50 cents per box, even for small orders) and the turnaround time for the boxes is much faster.
These boxes are obviously cheaper, but there are some trade-offs.
If you want to print all the way to the edge, you’ll need a custom stereo setup, which is not a cheap exercise. Because our branding is black rather than white (the base color of the box), we felt it was critical to maintain a consistent look for the Core Series boxes.
Therefore, for our Core Series, we customize each box with a stereo. For the limited versions, we don’t print all the way to the edge, which means these boxes look different and are a little cheaper.
They’re not the pretty shiny type, so the boxes don’t look too good. However, we feel the printing goes all the way to the edge and the boxes look very nice and the matte look suits our brand.
These boxes are only one A4 sheet with the available colors on it, and if you use more than a few colors, the box can get messy. Therefore, we had to choose the colors very carefully and design a box with only two colors. The box itself is white, so our design only includes black hops, blue-black and other colors (see below).
We have packaged the beers into 16 packs, starting blackout with the mid-range beers that we launched in March. We are now packaging the rest of our core line of beers into 16 packs for a limited release each month.
We still have 24 packs in stock, blackout so it may take a while before you see the 16 packs in the store.
If you have any questions, feel free to join our Black Hops Ambassadors group on Facebook.