This week on the Kondrat Podcast: a “Let’s Meet For A Beer” edition with Partake Brewing’s Founder and CEO Ted Fleming, who shares how a Crohn’s disease diagnosis led to him discovering a non-alcoholic beer landscape that didn’t satisfy his tastebuds, and how he’s solving that problem.
Like many Albertans, Ted was a growing craft beer enthusiast in the early 2000s as a number of craft brewers throughout the US and BC started shipping their brews into the province. However in 2005 he received a Crohn’s disease diagnosis which meant that he would need to avoid beer because of the alcohol content. Ted admits that at first he didn’t take this too seriously, a decision that caught up with him while on a trip to Greece after the birth of his daughter - playing fast and loose with his consumption habits landed him a week in the hospital.
After this he got into non alcoholic beer as a consumer, but discovered that the category was very boring. Wanting to enjoy some more variety, particularly while the variety of craft beer in the market was exploding, Ted started an online store for non alcoholic beer, brining in products from Europe with a larger variety. Running this store have him some exposure to the world of consumer packaged goods… and a foot in the door of the beer industry. Before long his customers started asking if he could get non alcoholic craft beer, so he began approaching brewers to ask if that was something they’d like to make and was largely laughed at.
With craft brewers not taking the idea seriously Ted rolled up his sleeves and got ready to find other solutions to this problem. A college in Ontario had recently started up a brewing program, and while he admits that Partake probably wasn’t the initial client that the college would have expected, it has worked out very well for both of them, allowing them to secure a government grant for R&D funds, and to bring in a microbiology PhD and a former head brewer from Labatt, which gave them a level of credibility they wouldn’t have had with a traditional contract brewer.
Once Partake was up and running in 2017 one of the big hurdles to overcome was the consumer perception of non alcoholic beer, which was made brutally obvious to Ted when he was told at a trade show that his product was “the dumbest idea ever.” And with the state of the non alcoholic category at the time, this wasn’t surprising. After all, Ted says that early on he was kind of solving his own problem of wanting a tastier non alcoholic beer.
Today Partake is available in a number of grocery and liquor stores across Canada including Sobey's, Safeway, Loblaw’s, and Superstore, has a small team in both Calgary and Toronto, and is preparing to expand into the US after having just raised $4,000,000USD in funding. It has become much more than just a non alcoholic beer that satisfies Ted’s tastebuds, and with a 2018 World Beer Awards win for best non alcoholic beer, Partake Brewing is changing the landscape of non alcoholic beer and bringing craft beer to a whole new group of people who can socialize the way they want to while still being true to the health and wellness goals.
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