EP-217 Jaisen Freeman of Phusion Projects

The world of beer is going through an identity crisis—it’s changing the
self-defined language of what’s craft and what not seemingly every few
years now, it’s doing battle with wine and spirits, except when it’s
embracing them in the form of natural wine and barrel-aging, it’s national,
regional, local, and hyperlocal, it’s taprooms and bars going to battle
over the same customers, it’s exploding cans and day-fresh distribution,
and festivals are dying except when they’re growing, and it’s focused on
diversity even as it undermines it’s own goals by competing for the same
21-34-year-old white males in every market, it’s IPAs except when it’s
Lagers, and increasingly it’s juice bombs and hard seltzers and FMBs, and
coffee roasting, distilling, and wine/beer hybrids.

It’s wild out there right now.

For today’s guest—I have a feeling all that seems a bit…charming.
Predictable, maybe. And certainly ripe for exploitation from a
manufacturing and marketing perspective. Because as much as we want to
think people define themselves by what category of beverage they prefer
(beer people, wine people, bourbon people), people like Jaisen Freeman of
Phusion Projects has long understood drinkers as category agnostic—pursuing
flavor, and brand, and functional benefits above all else. And generally
preferring to have a little—sometimes too much—fun along the way.

Phusion Projects is the maker of Four Loko, a notorious, exciting brand
that has an unbelievable distribution footprint in the U.S. despite
having its product formulation written out of the realm of legality by the
federal government after they’d already built their empire. Despite massive
lawsuits related to its potential for harm and or misuse. And despite
taking a massing hit in the realm of $40 million during that traumatic
period for the business. Within four years, it had climbed back to its
former peak. And now, with that chasm behind them, Phusion Projects is
expanding a portfolio of products geared towards finding the next big thing
for drinkers.

In the recent past, that’s included another infamous product, at least in
the small bubble of the craft beer world, with Not Your Father’s Root Beer,
a fermented malt beverage that got tried and true beer geeks worked up
over its root beer flavor and, in some cases, its high ABV. But it
attracted a massive mainstream audience as well as it expanded from a small
garage into a national footprint. And now they’re exploring the world of
vodka, hard seltzer, a flavored FMB that looks like a fancy blended wine or
sake, and Earthquake, which they pitch as the highest ABV Lager on the
market.

None of them come anywhere close to Four Loko’s success. Like, by multiple
orders of magnitude. But this is all pretty recent still as they climbed
out of that crater that those four years of Four Loko left them in. And
they got out of it, seemingly, all by themselves.

It’s a wild story, and for anyone struggling to understand what their next
few years are going to look like in the what might be the beer businesses’
most insane time period ever in this country, it’s a story with a lot of
lessons, both encouraging, and exceptionally hard.

This is Jaisen Freeman of Phusion Projects. Listen in.