Phillips Benefit Brew Kicks Off!

Today, Phillips Brewing Company kicked off voting in their annual Benefit Brew. The basic premise of the Benefit Brew is to create a special beer for a charity, name the beer after the cause and donate the proceeds—the charity receives some much-needed support, and the team over at Phillips gets to brew a fun new beer! Because of the overwhelming amount of much-deserved causes, Phillips puts the choice to the community via benefitbrew.com, allowing people to vote on which charity brew they’d like to see come to fruition. Past honourees include 2011’s Ancient Brown Ale (via the Ancient Forest Alliance) and last year’s Leviathan Milk Stout (via Cetus Conservation & Research Society).

How do they determine the right charity you ask? Taken right from their website:

1. A nomination period kicks things off (Oct. 15), where any federally-registered charity can be nominated for the prize (with the exception of children’s charities who cannot be nominated due to age-related alcohol marketing regulations).
2. Once nominations close (Oct. 26) 10 finalists are chosen to give the public a manageable number to consider as well as ensure that a variety of social areas are represented. Regardless of where the charities finish in the voting, each one will receive a $500 donation just for participating in the vote.
3. After the voting period ends (Nov. 16) the charity with the most votes will be named Benefit Brew Winner! We collaborate with them on a specially designed label, and when the beer is released we host a little release party as well as donate full proceeds of the sale of the beer for the cause.

All sounds amazing if you ask us! Our pal Matt Schmitz managed to sit down with Matt Phillips himself to pick his brain about this amazing good will project. In the meantime, get over to benefitbrew.com and vote for your pick!

When did you first start doing the Benefit Brews and how did the idea come about?  Were you approached or did you take the initiative?

It kind of started because we were asked to make a charity beer for Hudson Mack when he did the Cops For Cancer ride. It was pretty cool, and we liked the idea of being able to help out with beer. The next year we decided to help out TLC in their quest to purchase and preserve Madrona Farm – a great opportunity to help farming, something that we support as a company. The third year the penny dropped and we realized that we should be reaching out to our drinkers to help us decide who was worthy of a beer.

How do you pick the finalists from all the applicants in the selection process?  And how many apply?

Not sure how many applied – maybe 40 to 50 this year. We reached out into the community this year and had Khalil Akhtar from CBC and Mike Devlin from the Times Colonist help out, which was a great addition, something we hope to build on next year.

Do you get people from the winning organization to come in and “help” with the brewing process?  As in tossing some of the ingredients into the boil etc.

No, but cool idea. Might look at that this year… thanks!

How do you choose the proposed beer style for each charity?

We give a list of beers that might be appropriate – they get to choose from that.

How much money was raised for the past Benefit Brew winners and how did they put it to use?

Last year it was 10k, it keeps going up a bit as the beer sells better, and we can brew more of it.

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