Back in 2004, was the start of a love affair. I had discovered a range of beers so fresh and clean tasting, which were produced nearby and only yards from my drive to the office route. Fired up with naïve energy I popped in to see these amateurs, who clearly didn’t know they were re-defining a market, thought by many to be old and tired.  This first meeting was the tentative start of my learning process as I was introduced to the ultimate in no-marketing marketing. 

This business defies logic: it embraces competitors, it avoids self praise, it has virtually no advertising, it is seen as innovative because it delights in recreating older styles of beer, it is the darling of CAMRA yet its beers are far from just “real ale”.

You might not have heard of them back then, but in the years that have past, the brewery has moved into premises perhaps ten times bigger than the one we first met in, has beers now have titles such as: ‘World’s best Specialist Beer’ and ‘Champion Golden Ale’ (of Great Britain) – welcome to the Dark Star Brew Co. It was always a leader in the craft beer market – but it has been the most influential in creating and growing that market, which had for many years been seen as the province of expensive imported beers.

The Dark Star name is an appreciative nod to another group who put their product at the center of everything they did: the Grateful Dead rock band. The parallels are uncanny with both the band and the brewery taking no notice of all the fuss they generate while they focus on how to develop their art further and further.

The Grateful Dead were more that a band, they knew their market and created a business model that was the exact opposite to every other band at the time – if you like, they created the eBay verses the garage sale…they often performed for free, encouraged the crowd to record concerts and share them, we knew Dark Star was special at first sight, our job was top spread the word.

When we met the team, approx. 500,000 pints per annum were finding there way out of the brewery, now, the brewery looks set to break the 5 million pint barrier in 2011, so what have we done to be part of that jouney?

First establishing roots within the beer writing fraternity, we did as the Grateful Dead may have done…we looked to break a few rules and excite early adopters. This formed our strategy – we didn’t talk about their beer, we talked about other styles that we liked, or indeed copied (I think we’re supposed to say “drew influence from”) and we kept the company of breweries we admired. This policy of keeping good company stood the business in firm foundations, it wasn’t long before admiration for their beer extended beyond the pubs of Brighton and gained national recognition. The second big move was to realise just how powerful social networking really can be – still a relatively small brewery in the grand scheme of things @Darkstarbrewco is now the second most ‘followed’ brewery in the UK.