Pennsylvania-based Broken Goblet Brewing, Trauger Brewing and Lucky Cat Beer Co. are merging their operations to form the Mutual Respect Brewing and Distilling Collective.
Through the sharing of resources, all three breweries’ brands will be produced and sold at Broken Goblet’s Bensalem, Pennsylvania-based facility, which will be expanded with an additional 6,000 sq. ft. taproom.
Lucky Cat Brewing founder Mike “Scoats” Scotese equated the arrangement to a “New York City co-op building,” in which a group of people share ownership of a whole building rather than an individual unit, but “you get to live in your unit and do anything you want.”
“So we all kind of own everything, but the brands are still being run by the people that brought them,” he continued.
Mutual Respect’s ownership group includes Scotese; Traguer Brewing founder Jeremy Myers, who also founded Croydon, Pennsylvania-based Neshaminy Creek Brewing, but stepped down from ownership of that brewery in 2020; Broken Goblet’s ownership team of Andrew “Bubba” Grosse, Jason Grosse, Michael LaCourture and Kate Sweeney; and Jason Macias, former sales manager for Neshaminy Creek and Yardley, Pennsylvania-based Vault Brewing Company.
“We’ve taken to calling this ‘Voltron’ internally, because each constituent part brings something really special – and important – to the co-op,” LaCouture said in a press release, referring to the animated cartoon in which a group of universe-defending space explorers combine their vehicles to form a giant super robot. “When you put it together, it’s unlike anything in the area, and will be a major disruptive influence in the way small breweries and even distilleries adapt to the always changing climate in alcohol sales and tap room trends.”
The brewery and distilling co-op plans to add 6,000 sq. ft. to its existing 15,000 sq. ft. Bensalem facility with the addition of a second tasting room, full kitchen and expanded entertainment space, which is expected to be completed by the end of this year. The facility will have production capacity of more than 3,000 barrels annually.
A yet-to-be named distiller will also join the collective in the future, which will use a new distillery space being added to the Bensalem location this summer. Scotese said the addition will allow for collaboration on ready-to-drink canned cocktails (RTDs) and in-house mixed drinks.
The co-op is in the process of forming a governing board, but Scotese said they will continue to be a “consensus-run group,” where “titles don’t really matter” and “no one feels like all of the weight is on them.” Management and staff from each company will remain in place through the merger.
The partnership is particularly helpful for smaller companies such as Trauger (which produces small-batch German beers) and Lucky Cat (a nanobrewery evolved from a beer bar) that rely more on taproom sales, but may not have the resources alone to create their own space and expand, Scotese said. Broken Goblet produced 470 barrels of beer in 2020 (the most recent year for which data is available from the Brewers Association), while Lucky Cat produced 15 barrels.
Lucky Cat and Trauger had previously attempted to find a location for their two breweries, but Scotese said the plans fell through. Through the process, the two breweries realized that, rather than creating another small brewpub with a small production space, it might be better to join an existing larger brewery and bring all their beers together.
“It’s not like the world needs another brew house that’s only being used once a week or another canner that’s getting used once a week,” Scotese said.”And it also allows the brands to focus a little more, and to really try to do things really well, because you need to have beers people want and beers that you want, but it doesn’t allow you to really craft a brand that has a real focus.”
The merger also allows the smaller breweries to experiment more with beer styles, while still providing consumers with a range of offerings that the breweries’ existing base enjoy.
“There’s a lot of great beer styles that for whatever reason have been lost to time,” Scotese said. “So there’s a lot of opportunities to take these styles of beer, maybe work with the people that made them to begin with, and to bring them for a new generation, as well as bringing them back to people that drank them 20-some years back.”
Although Scotese said the collective is staying small for now, it is open to brands with similar goals and ideas to join in the future, and will continue to explore ways to expand the company physically with added own-premise locations.
The group also plans to transition the cooperative into an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) in the next 12-18 months.