Eric Tanner has a dream — he wants to make brewing beer at home accessible and affordable for everyone. He and business partner Anthony Stoeber have designed a home-brewing platform they’ve dubbed the “Brewers Buddy.”
Tanner and Stoeber met at Northern Kentucky University more than a decade ago. Bonding over a shared love of craft beer, the two eventually started experimenting with brewing beer in Stoeber’s kitchen. With a cluttered stovetop and relatively unimpressive results, they thought there had to be an easier way to make beer at home.
“We were brewing extract recipes on a non-gas stovetop, which took forever and would get quite messy,” Tanner says. “So in order to help us speed up and clean up our process, Anthony (Stoeber) started sketching out some ideas.”
The first real Brewers Buddy prototype, which the two hand-built in the garage, took about two weeks to fabricate, even though neither of the guys has any obvious background that would lend itself to devising such a machine.
“Our passion to create a better product far exceeded the engineering know-how to accomplish (it),” Tanner says.
In total, the parts needed to create the Brewers Buddy — including particleboard, propane tanks and bayou burners — were all purchased at home improvement stores for about $1,000.
“The home brewing scene is very DIY, but it can be expensive,” Tanner says. “In our research of looking at similar products, we found there was a huge void in affordable platforms.”
The first prototype was too tall, leaving only an inch of clearance for a normal garage, and it wasn’t as portable as they wanted it to be.
Then came the trial and error: Tanner and Stoeber got together whenever possible to brew with the machine to try out the quality of their batches. After getting additional advice from home-brewing friends and local breweries, they finalized the basic Brewers Buddy design.
The result is a gravity-fed system with a three-tier brewing stand — one burner on top and one on bottom — with a mash tun in the middle. The burners simultaneously heat the liquor tank at the top and brew kettle at the bottom, which allows liquid to flow throughout the brewing mechanism without stopping.
This makes the home-brewing process more efficient, cuts down on brewing time and provides a safe all-in-one central platform for gravity fed brewing. And the tiered cart comes with durable caster wheels, which means it’s easily mobile and it gets you out of the kitchen, “which likely makes the significant other happy,” Tanner adds.
The newest version can also be converted from a gravity-fed system to a pump-fed system out of the box, and all the necessary parts for conversion are included.
As of right now, the Brewers Buddy and its covers are manufactured in China.
“This is the lowest-cost method, which keeps it as affordable as it is,” Tanner says.
Starting in July, the Brewers Buddy will be sold online and at Paradise Brewing in Anderson, along with in-store locations in Wisconsin, Massachusetts and Indiana. And Tanner and Stoeber hope to keep going.
“We’re looking into big-box, brick-and-mortar kind of retail,” Tanner says. “And we hope to expand after 2016.”
That means expanding their e-commerce aspect as well. But in order to do that, they have to spread the word. Up until this point, Tanner has handled the majority of the marketing and media aspect, including creating a Kickstarter campaign that raised $40,000 to launch the business.
As they progress with new designs and products, Tanner and Stoeber say they plan to keep things simple and will avoid making “sexy products” like the slick and expensive brewing machines that can already be found online. The goal is to create a simple brewing platform for novice, advanced and aspiring home-brewers.
Slick might look cool, Tanner says, but he thinks that’s counter to what home-brewing and beer-drinking is all about.
“Our goal has always been to introduce an affordable, versatile, durable and safe product while keeping the brewing DIY and fundamentals alive,” Tanner says. “Most importantly, it’s about bringing people together for a common goal. For us, it’s brewing beer.”
For more info on BREWERS BUDDY and to find sales locations, visit brewersbuddy.com.
This article appears in Jun 15-22, 2016.