Brewbound Pitch Slam 14: Semi-Finals - High Seas Mead

Speaker 1 [00:24] Our next semi-finalist is Austin Corrigan, who's the founder of High Seas Mead. Come on up, Austin. Great to see you. Just keep an eye on your timer, please. Thank

Austin Corrigan [00:35] you. Good morning, everybody. I am Austin Corrigan. I am the founder of High Seas Mead in Santa Barbara, California. Over at High Seas Mead, we, we craft a line of session style craft sparkling meads that are certified organic, gluten-free, and made with only clean, made with clean, crisp, crushable ingredients. High Seas came to life in 2019 in the wake of a severe car wreck I was involved in. Dozens of surgeries, tons of downtime. I needed to find something that I could do to keep my mind kind of just keep myself stable. So I did the obvious thing and started fermenting in my garage. Makes sense, right? Um. I got to the point where beers made my body ache, kombuchas all started to taste the same, and I had this bright idea of starting to ferment honey. And with that, High Seas was born. We now currently have 55 core flavors on the market. Our Cosmic Bandido, blackberry pineapple, Cheap Thrills, raspberry coconut, Mystic vibration, watermelon lemon, Mina colada pineapple coconut, and Son of a beach, our take on Hawaiian pog, pineapple, passion, orange, guava. We are currently sold in over 100 self-distributed in over 120 accounts throughout California with notable ones in LA such as Arawon Markets, and we are currently on boarding with Whole Foods, Albertson's, Vaughn's, and Devillions at a hyperlocal level. Our 4 packs retail for $21. We recommend our single cans retail between $499 and $799 and then our wholesale case prices are $85. In the near future, we look, we very much look forward to working with the distributor to, uh, grow our footprint in the market and are opening our tap room in the next few months here. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 [02:29] Great stuff. Mead. I'm trying to remember how many mead brands we've seen in this competition. Ryan, you probably know just as well as I do, but uh, what do you think the Pisces and the what they're bringing to the category?

Speaker 3 [02:42] Uh, I like the liquid a lot. Uh, I think mead's a really interesting category. Um, I think, you know, the challenge with mead is education is making the consumer aware of what it is, why it's interesting, why they should try it. Um, that's always the hurdle with mead for me, but I love the love the liquid. Yeah.

Speaker 1 [02:56] Rich, um, you know, you describe yourself as a craft beer guy through and through, but, um, you know, you start with craft beer and then maybe you grow into mead. Do you think that's possible with High Seas? Yeah,

Speaker 4 [03:05] so it's funny, through our outreach in Funky Town, there's a homebrewer that always brings some mead around, so I feel well versed for this. Very curious though, like carbonated mead, I think that's cool. I, I wanted him to call out mead a little bit more on the label so people know that they're jumping into something new, but like, it's a good product, uh, the flavors are good. Um, yeah, they just need more education on mead. I always think of like Beowulf if you guys, but, uh. But it can, it can be real good as a, just another RTD out there, yeah, yeah, it's

Speaker 1 [03:40] a good point of reference, you know. Um, Jamie, uh, we heard from Austin about, uh, price point. Obviously we see pack size, um, you know, what do you think about both when you're considering this brand?

Speaker 5 [03:52] You know I'm uh I'm new, um, into mead and I tasted it for the first time this morning um it's the first one I've had to be honest, and it was actually really delicious, um, so I think the price value to the consumer is there, um, I do think the awareness though and like the education is, is gonna be a, a big part of this category, um, not necessarily just with this brand. But just overall with you know getting consumers more knowledgeable about the space and how to think about it, the process and, and why the price is what it is based on the process kind of think things like wine and and those types of things, right? um, so that would just be my feedback there but overall I think it's really cool. I think that it was delicious, um. I think just make sure that it's really clear what it is and what consumers can expect when they taste it. The more you can communicate that on the package, I think the better it'll be.

Speaker 1 [04:48] Mhm. Just, uh, maybe mead needs like a breakout brand, and do you think High Seas could be that breakout brand?

Speaker 6 [04:53] It could be, and I, I really appreciate the hustle of going to you, you, I mean, you mentioned Arawan and, and Vaughn's and Whole Foods. You're taking these, you know, big stores and you're saying, hey, I'm gonna knock it out of the park in this neighborhood, this neighborhood in this neighborhood. And just, you know, keep getting in there, try to get samplings done and just, that's going to build your story. So when you go in next year in the, in the fall to make your pitch for the spring sets, uh, hopefully, you've got some really great numbers.