Thriving Alcohol-Free with Mocktail Mom

EP 70 Brewing For A Better Tomorrow With Joe Chura of Go Brewing

• Deb, Mocktail Mom • Season 1 • Episode 70

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Ever wondered what it’s like to host David Goggins in your basement or kickstart a non-alcoholic beer revolution? Buckle up, because in this episode, I’m chatting with Joe Chura, the dynamic founder of Go Brewing, and he’s got some wild stories and inspiring insights to share! 

In our conversation, Joe opens up about his personal journey of unhealthy drinking habits that affected his health in difficult ways. During the COVID pandemic, Joe and his wife, Heather, realized they needed a change and committed to going 75 days without alcohol, where he first discovered non-alcoholic beer and was inspired to launch his own NA brewery.

Joe talks about the inception of Go Brewing, describing the naturally low-calorie and gluten-free offerings, and highlighting the health benefits from their carefully chosen ingredients. He talks about the importance of making better choices and how non-alcoholic beers can be a part of a balanced, healthy lifestyle. From funny stories about running and doing push-ups with Goggins to insightful reflections on personal growth and community building, this episode is packed with inspiration and practical advice for anyone looking to improve their well-being. Tune in for a conversation that's as motivating as it is entertaining!


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You are loved. Big Time Cheers!

Deb:

Buckle up, friends, and welcome to the Thriving Alcohol-Free Podcast. I'm your host, deb, otherwise known as Mocktail Mom, a retired wine drinker that finally got sick and tired of spinning on life's broken record called Detox to Retox. Let this podcast be an encouragement to you. If alcohol is maybe a form of self-care for you, where you find yourself dragging through the day waiting to pour another glass, I am excited to share with you the fun of discovering new things to drink when you aren't drinking and the joy of waking up each day without a hangover. It is an honor to serve as your sober, fun guide. So sit back and relax or keep doing whatever it is you're doing. This show is produced for you with love from the great state of Kentucky. Thanks so much for being here and big time cheers. Hey friends, it's Deb. Welcome back to Thriving Alcohol-Free.

Deb:

I am so excited today because Joe Chura is joining us from Go Brewing. Joe is the founder of Go Brewing. He was kind enough to join me for a happy half hour with my membership. Joe, I absolutely love Go Brewing. I was introduced to you guys through Rob at Generation NA when I was up at his shop last year and I absolutely just love your non-alcoholic beers and just your story. So I wanted to have you on today. Thank you so much for joining me. I wanted to have you share your founder story and share about Go Brewing. Does that sound good?

Joe:

Sounds great and shout out to Rob what a great individual and human and just a natural connector.

Deb:

Agree, I totally agree. Yep, he really, really is, and I love his shop. It's like the mecca of non-alcoholic stuff, right? Yeah, so you've been down there several times, right? A couple of times.

Joe:

I have, and I have to give him credit. I pick his brain all the time. I'm like what's selling, what's moving, what styles do you like? And I think, from his perspective, it's so focused on non-alcoholic beverages that who better to ask than someone that watches from merchandising what someone's picking up off the shelf to the styles? And he told me one day I was out there this was I don't know like nine months ago at this point. He's like anything that's double IPA just moves super quick and he goes, but we can't get our hands on any. I'm like well, why don't we make a double IPA then? And the beauty about having our own brewery is we can go from idea to reality really quickly.

Joe:

So I went back to my team and we were doing an activation in June at the Chicago half marathon.

Joe:

It was in Garfield Park and we're like let's create a beer for the event and we'll give back to underserved neighborhoods in Chicago for at least the first couple of batches of this beer. So we created a beer called Not Just Another Story. It's an ode to the fact that on the news I'm sure it's where you're at too it's just a lot of violence, a lot of stuff that's constantly happening and we've grown immune to it because we just hear it every day. And the reality is behind those stories, there's kids and families' lives that are being affected forever, and, unfortunately, a lot of these crimes are happening by younger kids that really never have a chance, and that really bothers me, and it's happening 30 miles from here. So I'm like let's do our part. Let's create a beer called Not Just Another Story. We'll launch it, we'll see what happens and two weeks later the beer sold out and we're like, wow, and even though it's a Chicago-based story, that beer is now across the United States selling at retail establishments with that Chicago-based origin to it, which is pretty cool.

Deb:

That is so awesome. Okay, yes, so huge shout out to Rob for bringing the double IPA to your attention. That is very cool. Yeah, so true. Yeah, just like when you think about, like, when you see it on the news and stuff, we're so jaded, we see it so much right, and it is like you said, it's somebody's family.

Joe:

Yeah, that's right and it's the saddest thing ever. I remember listening to Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History If you haven't heard that podcast, I highly recommend listening to it and he did a story about kids like that that grew up in gangs and underserved areas and really it's like when they're in the third grade, that's when things start to change for them. So think about that, Like you know, like when they're in the third grade, that's when things start to change for them. So think about that. When you're in high school, it's kind of already too late. You got to really start giving these kids hope early and anything I could do to do my part to make that happen, I'm doing it.

Deb:

That's awesome. That's awesome. Okay, so how on earth did you go from the automotive tech industry? You had a business with over 500 employees, am I right? Yes, I can't imagine what that's like. I can't even imagine, I don't want to get into it, but okay, so that was your background in terms of business. How on earth did you get into Go Brewing? How did you start this business?

Joe:

Yeah, it's a long story, but I'll summarize it in saying that I grew up on the south side of Chicago and found out I was going to be a father when I was 19 years old and I needed a good job and I had friends and friends' parents mainly friends' parents, not really any of my friends that worked at the Ford plant. So I was very lucky to get a job there. I mean, I was a very marketable kid. I was actually very lost in life and barely graduated high school, just got into one college. My daughter now asked me why didn't I apply to a bunch of schools? I'm like I'm lucky I even got into any school.

Deb:

It's the same way.

Joe:

Right, it's like life's messy, but that's what I love about it. So I ended up getting a job at Ford plant and within a few days I knew I didn't want to be there forever. I heard this common language across the plant saying, like you know, we only have 30 years left, or we only have 29 years left. And I'm like 29 years, like that's a long time, and I was. I wasn't smart enough to understand the potential I had in life. All I knew is like I needed to get off this assembly line. But my dream was to like be in the plant and be in the trim department and be a supervisor, and we were building the 1998 Ford Taurus. At the time I put on seatbelts, scuff plates, b-pillars, all this stuff. These cars are rolling down a line. But I realized that it was like this human robot and I started to look at my peers and started to observe them. In between building cars they were looking at their little TVs and this is like pre-cell phone, right? You're looking at literally box TVs with antennas. People are reading papers. I'm like, well, if I enroll in college, I could read my books in between building cars. And I did exactly that and I started reading in between building cars, the 1994 Taurus, and would read 15 seconds at a time and did that eight to 10 hours a day. And I did that for it took me three and a half years to graduate, ended up learning an unbelievable studying methodology in terms of reading small snippets at a time that would otherwise never work and that transformed my life. And I was able to get out of the plant to the marketing sales division at Ford where I called on dealers. I was a Ford rep, I was a consultant. My primary job is to wholesale them vehicles. So vehicles Ford dealers have on their lot, a rep's responsible for selling those and it was me and I did well there.

Joe:

But the internet was starting to take off and that was my passion. Since I was a kid I was obsessed with the Commodore 64. My brothers would play video games and I would just code and I was like this internet is going to be a thing. So I started to train other dealers on it and really educate them that like hey, these people that are communicating with you online like the real people, you should follow up with them. And this was so early on. But it really got me into my passion, which is the core to what I ended up creating in 2011, which was a digital marketing agency that specialized in helping dealers show up on the web so like Google, primarily being like all of those channels.

Joe:

And then I realized a couple of years later that I'm like man if we want to be a viable marketing company, we need to take control of the website where we're sending these customers. We were creating this traffic in Google, so someone would Google a dealership's name, or like best Ford dealer in Illinois, you know and they would go to a website. But the website was inadequate. It didn't have analytics, there was no measurements, and I was like man. If we can figure that out, like I think we can have a better looking website we can track. The goal was just to help our marketing clients and that business took off. So Launch Digital Marketing was created in 2011. Dealer Inspire in 2013. And 2013,. We were pretty bootstrapped. By 2017, we're number 39 fastest growing company in America.

Joe:

I had 400 employees or so, and then Carscom, amongst many others, had reached out wanting to possibly acquire with us our partner, and I felt like that was the right fit. It was the right time. So I ended up selling both businesses and stayed on as the CEO of those companies through 2021 and then became the chief innovation officer at carscom in 22. And now I'm just a consultant there and help them when needed. But how I got into NA was really along the parallel path of like 2018.

Joe:

When I sold the businesses, I looked at myself and I was 250 pounds. I was out of shape. I watched my father die of alcoholism and drugs. My brother was in the hospital every month for alcohol-related reasons and I was like what did I just build this for? What's the purpose of what I just did? And health and taking care of myself became prominent because I was such a bad example for my family but just my employees and everyone because I just was super unhealthy. I would drink often. I wasn't the type that would wake up and like need a drink in the morning, but certainly at five o'clock and on weekends I would look forward to it and I just once I had a few. I wanted more and I just knew it was an issue.

Joe:

So, long story short, the height of COVID.

Joe:

My wife and I were like enough's, enough.

Joe:

We were just gluttons.

Joe:

We were eating like crap.

Joe:

This was March, april of 2020. And we're like let's do this challenge where we abstain from alcohol. So we've been staying for 75 days and this challenge that we did for some of my life. I ever went more than a week at most and I felt incredible. I had less anxiety. I had so much clarity in my brain, my skin started looking better. I thought I had these permanent wrinkles under my eyes that just kind of went away and I started losing weight and I started to take on a lot more positive habits in my life, like eating better and not perfection by any means, but just better.

Joe:

And then I would wake up and I'd work out and I got a trainer and all of a sudden I was transforming my body and my life and by the end of the 75 days I'm like I never want to go back to how I was. But throughout that process the only thing that helped me with those five o'clock cravings and the weekend cravings was non-alcoholic beer, and at the time there wasn't a lot of companies around. Athletic was starting to take off and huge kudos to them for pioneering this space. I'd be remiss not to thank them for that, but I had some of their beer and then, knowing that, I knew how to sell online and that was such a passion of mine and knowing that, how much this beverage helped me in my life and I was like man, if I had a wider variety of options and I was able to sell it online, I could build a brand. And it was my wife with the idea she had to be a partner in this and she's like I love it.

Joe:

It's really helped us and once a few things happened and I was like let's go for it, pun intended, and we transformed my garage into a brewery in that very end of 21 and in all of 22 and created a lab out of it and really started to develop our beer and recipes. So I had a head brewer, I had a lab scientist, I had a consultant, all reporting to my garage. Just imagine you're like garage at home.

Joe:

Yeah, I swear Like the whole year, like they were coming to work and like my wife would be taking the kids, like we're all disheveled in the morning and these folks would be showing up for work, you know.

Deb:

You're like, let me move the cars around in the driveway, let's open up the garage. Yeah, that's so funny, joe.

Joe:

Yeah, yeah, that's so funny, joe. Yeah, it was such an interesting time, but I knew I'm like if I could really build this brand online, first use it as a testing grounds to see what people like, because I really didn't have any idea, I didn't have any background in beer, but I wanted to learn more. So I went and I got my Brews certificate to understand how the brewing process worked. I obviously observed my team for that period of time and started to sell online and really just started testing and our first round of beers. We still have a few of them today, but a few of them. One of them we're not going to make anymore. So it's like because we're constantly testing, we're iterating, we're understanding what the market likes and the benefit to having our own brewery is so huge because we can you and I can talk about an idea today and within a month from now we can have a reality of a product, and that's very rare, like if you're relying on someone else. It's very difficult.

Deb:

That's incredible, yeah. Just how quickly you can pivot, make it happen, innovate. That's amazing, Okay. When you came in to the Happy Half Hour, you shared a story with my membership about a guy who came to your tap room. So you ship online. You ship all over the country, You're available in stores, some stores locally but then you have a tap room right Up there outside of. Chicago. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Joe:

Sure, yeah, we're in seven states through distribution. What that means is we have the ability to sell essentially across the United States, and someone listening to this podcast can go on Amazon right now. They could go on our website. They could purchase our product. You'll get it delivered within two days. It comes fast, yes, yeah, we wanted to really kind of focus on the customer service aspect, which allowed the last business to grow. We always had this philosophy we win with innovation, but we retain with service, and we want to do the same thing here. So we have a great customer support team. We don't want to be this company where you order your beer and you might get it in a week or two, which we were really seeing in the beverage space. It was kind of weird and I'm like, well, we could even disrupt that part of it, which isn't a crazy thing. It was just.

Deb:

Yeah, when I ordered, I think I got an email. I think I ordered at like 6pm or maybe, I don't know, five o'clock. I got an email that night saying it was packaged. There was a tracking number. It was at my doorstep, I think, within 48 hours.

Joe:

Yeah, yeah, that's our goal, so it's Amazing. I mean, from a customer experience standpoint, it's not great to buy beverages online. It's not a great experience. So we want to make a great experience the best we can.

Joe:

So we have that business, we have Amazon, we have a beer club, we have distribution in seven states, we're in a bunch of supermarkets like Kroger, jewel, binnie's in the Chicagoland area, giant Eagle in Ohio, john's Marketplace in Oregon and a variety of others, and growing the taproom, though, was something that we didn't really have any content. We didn't have any sort of humans consuming our beer, and we were like having a taproom is going to be amazing because we're the only one in Illinois that has draft beer that's non-alcoholic. So we're like, why don't we just go all in on this? We created this really kind of upscale taproom. That's very different. In fact, the first Google review we ever received was a negative one, unfortunately, but it said like our brewery looked like a winery and our prices were too high and all this stuff, and it's like. You know, it takes a lot to build this. So we have this brewery and we have a tap room, and then we have the production facility right behind it, not just similar to other breweries. In fact if you went in ours you wouldn't even know it's not alcoholic, there's not like special machines or anything like that.

Joe:

We share a parking lot with another brewery called Solomoth and they've been around for over a decade. They're a great Chicagoland brewery, like a staple brewery. Give them a lot of credit for giving us a lot of the expertise, even helping me understand pricing. When we first started Just didn't really know anything. So the first couple months we had people that would come over to our brewery and think they were there and it was pretty funny. But if you think about it you can't really see where we're at. If you guys could Google map it and maybe get a better understanding. But we're in this industry industrial park in Naperville, which is a suburb of Illinois. So the thought that there'd be two breweries sharing a parking lot is just it's probably like a rare thought someone would have.

Joe:

So you come back here. You come back here. You see action, you're probably going to head toward it, even though our sign says co-brewing and everything. So we have people sit down often and they'll start consuming beer and they think they're at the other brewery. And we had a customer come in here and he was literally sitting down here for hours.

Joe:

I finally walk up to him and I'm like do you normally drink non-alcoholic beer? And he looked at me like I was nuts and he's like what are you talking about? And I'm like, well, yeah, do you consume any beer? And he's just like, no, I would never consume any beer. And then he looks at the board and he's like, yeah, that's like 5, point, that's like 4.9%. I'm like, no, that's 0.49%, because every beer we have on our board it has the alcohol by volume and the calories. So to us it makes a lot of sense, but to someone coming in that may not be a beer connoisseur, it might be foreign. What does that mean? So I was like no, this is like you're drinking non-alcoholic beer. He goes oh my God, I wondered why I wasn't getting a buzz and it was hilarious. So he calls other friends in and he's trying to hide the fact that we're not alcoholic, to see if they notice and we've had that same experience in many other places Like we will be at a beer fest and we're now intentionally doing a blind taste test. So we'll take our, for example, our new school sour, the strawberry blueberry. Wonderful sour, 55 calories. Just a beer you could totally consume in summer.

Joe:

It looks great in a stainless wine glass, it's one of my favorites. And we'll take that beer and then we'll compare it to an alcoholic sour that we don't make but like a popular one, and we'll do a blind taste test and we'll have people come up and see if they could tell which one has alcohol. And we were at this very prominent beer fest last year it was the Oak Park Beer Fest in Chicago and 50% of the people did not know or could not tell that our beer didn't have alcohol.

Deb:

That's incredible. That is incredible.

Joe:

And that's the goal right. We knew to be a successful company and to trick your brain into and I hate using the word trick, but getting your brain used to like oh, here's a taste that I know is going to occur my craving, and I don't need the alcohol. That, to me, was so important. To get that taste right, because if you don't have that taste and it tastes like something else, like we've all had wine that tastes like grape juice, that's not alcoholic, you're like it doesn't fill that void and for us it was number one's product, like. Our mission statement is simple. It's hard to do, but it's simple in terms of what it is. It's to make the best NA beer on the planet. Without that, nothing else happens. I can't do those things in Chicago that I was talking about. I cannot fill even my own voids when I have a craving for alcohol, not to mention other people. That was so key for us.

Deb:

I love that mission statement. Yeah, make the best NA beer on the planet. And you're doing that. It's happening. You've won so many awards, right? I mean the one that you were talking about not just another story. Right, it's won what? Two gold medals.

Joe:

It just won a gold medal. It wasn't around last year when we submitted for it. Okay, the Pilsner, the suspended and something. Pilsner and the Sunshine State won gold and silver respectively last year for the Best Craft Beer Awards. This year we won the gold medal for not just another story the double IPA, and we were in a competition with I think there was thousands of entries I forgot how many and the NA beer category, for better or worse, there's only two categories. So if you look at regular beer, there's 100 categories and NA beer there's two. So there's a lot of NA breweries now that are submitting. So just to win that just meant a lot for us because it's very competitive there. So there's a lot of NA breweries now that are submitting. So just to win that just meant a lot for us, because it's very competitive there and there's people making really great beer and they're doing a great job.

Deb:

That's awesome. That's awesome. Okay, as you guys know, I love Giesen 0% wines. Their Sauvignon Blanc is my go-to on a regular basis. They recently launched a delicious sparkling brute 0%, which is quickly becoming a fan favorite. I am so proud to have Giesen as the exclusive non-alcoholic wine sponsor of the Thriving Alcohol-Free Podcast.

Deb:

Giesen 0% wines are created through the magic of advanced spinning cone technology to remove the alcohol from their full-leaded wines. The award-winning winemaker Duncan Shuler and his team have done wonders in Marlborough, new Zealand, by creating an entire family of 0% wines with all the flavor and deliciousness you expect from traditional quote full-leaded wine. Their non-alcoholic wines maintain the aroma and the body to create a low-calorie wine that never contains more than 0.5 ABV. Globally available, look for Giesen 0% wines wherever you shop for your non-alcoholic options. Their family of alcohol-free wines include the most effervescent member of the family, the sparkling Brut 0%, which is absolutely delicious for any celebration.

Deb:

My personal favorite although I do love them all is the Sauvignon Blanc, coming in at only 100 calories for the entire bottle, and, not to be missed, the other members of their 0% family, the Riesling, the Premium Red Blend, the Rosé, the Pinot Gris. With Giesen's 0% wines, there's a de-alcoholized wine for everyone and every occasion. Give Giesen a try and let me know how much you love it, and if you want to meet their winemaker, go back to episode 33 of the podcast, where Duncan Shuler joined me to share about the Giesen story. Okay, how did you come up with the name Go Brewing? Where did the name Go come from?

Joe:

Yeah. So, going back to that origin story and maybe backing up a little bit, in 2017, I created this event called Refuel and it was meant for a day for my employees to get a reprieve and a refuel from their grind. Dealing with auto dealers all day long is tough, so I was like how can I bring speakers in to inspire our team that have nothing to do with automotive, nothing to do with marketing? So I started to build this conference and we hosted it at a local church and it seats 1,200 people, and the first year we had our 300 employees in there, so we had a bunch of empty seats. So the next year, I was like, well, why don't I sell tickets for the rest of that capacity and we'll give proceeds to charities, since I already had this on cost, so we get proceeds to a local food pantry, and this is 2018.

Joe:

2019, I was able to get a bigger budget to go after bigger speakers, so I had folks like David Goggins out. Oh yeah, david Goggins did a workout for my house in 2019. No, yeah, I got a video. I'll send it to you.

Deb:

Oh my gosh.

Joe:

Yeah, I got a picture with him in my basement. I'm like, hey, can you go in the basement by my pull-up bar? It was kind of awkward but it was. And exactly what you think of Goggins is what we got. He came in and we did this Ron, I'm going on a little tangent here and we stopped along the way and did calisthenics, Like that was the thing. I look behind us and like half the group's missing, my wife included. We had, like the local police department and fire department participate in this. Like half of them were gone. So we're doing these jumping jacks and we would do. We had to do a thousand jumping jacks and a thousand pushups. It felt like that.

Deb:

At least it was a lot Everyone on the ground. This is during the event.

Joe:

No, this is before it. So the event started at like 10. This was at like 5.30 in the morning. It's December 14th in Chicago, 14 degrees out. Goggins shows up in shorts, a shirt like this and a hat and he was like a robot. He was like a robot. He was like watching a human robot. It was crazy. He was our keynote that year. The next year I had Jesse Itzler, tony Hawk come out, a bunch of others. It was amazing and it was during the height of COVID. We ended up raising $80,000 for our charity partner when we didn't even think we're going to be able to put on the conference.

Joe:

So, it was incredible and this is my long-winded way of saying that, as great as that conference was, what happened with it is people would get so inspired and they were so thankful, they were filled with gratitude, but the next day life took over and the next day all that inspiration went away. So I was like how do I create a conference with that same spirit but actually make people do things? Because in this they're just sitting down and they're like everything's like yeah, tomorrow I'm going to start that. And that was the issue my wife and I had over years. We're like Monday the diet starts, or next month, or it's going to be the first and not dissimilar to many others, and that's what that conference felt like. So I'm like why don't we create a conference called Go and then we start the day off with a 5K run, with an obstacle course, kind of like the Goggins thing, which wasn't really part of the event. It was just like the side thing we did and then we'll have.

Joe:

Then I invited Rich Roll out. So Rich Roll spoke at the event. Him and I did a fireside chat, but in order to do that, he actually ran it with us. He ran this 5K with us side chat. But in order to do that, he actually ran it with us. He ran this 5k with us, and then we did a fireside chat, and then we did self-defense, jujitsu and martial arts training with a group. So there's a lot of females, there are males, and we did this amazing self-defense training. And then we had Jordan Burroughs, which is Olympic gold wrestler, come out and he did a fireside chat with me, and then we did yoga, and then we had another fireside chat and at the end of the conference and this was one of the catalysts to create Go I was handing out athletic brewing.

Deb:

Wow.

Joe:

And I was like man, there's something missing here, because I could not really follow up with the community in the right way At this time. I was getting out of my main role at Dealer Inspire and cars were at a ton of employees there to have a conference for them. It became now like, okay, I'm getting out of that, now what? And it was just this thing that kind of stuck in my mind. I'm like, well, if I had our own brewery, maybe we call it Go and our Go is just another way to say it. It's our, just do it.

Joe:

It's the way we think about taking action. Like many times we overthink things and most of the time we'll get our answers and we'll get changed by movement. Like you know, motion creates emotion and I'm really like sick of the Instagram all, like you know, hyperbole, stuff. But the reality is like some of this is rooted in truth is that you know Rich Roll says it best mood follows action. You have to do stuff. If I don't feel like doing it, I start to do it and then all of a sudden I'm like, oh, okay, I can do this. The same thing goes for business. The same thing goes for anything you want to attempt. In life, the last thing you want is to be in your deathbed and regret things you haven't tried. I'd rather try than fail and you learn than not try at all. So it's just go, just do it. So that's it. That's the story.

Deb:

I'm thinking about all the things in my own life that I keep thinking like, oh, the first, or I want to all those things, and it's like okay, just do it. Not just do it, but go, just go.

Joe:

Yeah, and I'm far from perfect. Like I, I still drink in moderation. I'm not completely sober and there's some months where I'm like man, I'm just like far, far less than what I was before, but like still it happens and I remind myself like well, this is why I don't do it. And I get back, or like I see how it affects my training, like I'm doing the, I'm going to run the London marathon in a week from now and my training wasn't as good last month as it as it could have been because, again, the habits that I know very well.

Joe:

But sometimes we get in this rut in life and you just, it's just the reality of it, like if it was perfect then it'd be boring, Like we got to give ourselves these challenges. You know it's just like business, it's a roller coaster. Within moments I'll be like I'm a genius and then five seconds later I'm like I'm the dumbest person in the world. Why did I do this? And it's messy, like what I said earlier, life is messy, but the dots connect backwards. The story makes sense when you look at it in retrospective, when you think about what's going on forward, like if you told me 10 years ago I'd be talking to you about a non-alcoholic brewery I created and in a little podcast room I'd be like you're insane, dad, like that's the last thing I would do. But you know, you just follow the path that life gives you.

Deb:

Oh, that's so good, that's such good advice. Yeah, okay, before we go, do you want to talk a little bit about that? But I've loved talking to you. I could talk to you for hours, but I'm not a Joe Rogan podcast.

Joe:

Oh no, no, totally, totally get it. All of our beer is naturally low in calories. It doesn't have the alcohol component to it, and one of the things I learned over the last year, the last couple of years, is there's macros that we all know there's fat, there's carbs and there's protein. So fat has seven calories per gram protein and carbs have four calories per gram. Well, alcohol is another. I wouldn't even call it a macro because it's empty calories, but it's actually seven calories per gram.

Joe:

So just to like pause there for a second, when you see Michelob, ultra or some of these low carb beers and people are like, oh, how many carbs does your beer have? It's the wrong question. The question is how many total calories do you have and how many carbs you have, because then you could see how many empty calories you're consuming. And those alcohol calories, those calories from alcohol, are far worse for you than the calories from beer itself. So the power with NA beer and there's a ton of studies on this is that it is naturally nourishing, like it is good for recovery because there's maltose in it. So there's the good grains, there's the good malts, and there's been a ton of studies on the power of NA beer for recovery versus athletic drinks even and I think that's really an important fact and a misconception people have, and something I learned the beers that we have, too, are naturally low in gluten, meaning that every beer that we have that we sent to a lab for third-party testing, it actually came back under 20 parts per million in gluten, which is under the gluten-free guidelines.

Joe:

Now, if you have celiac and you're listening to this, I warn you that this beer does have barley in it and it does have gluten, but the gluten levels are so low that many people are okay, not people with severe celiac. However, we do have two beers that we made strictly without any gluten and we didn't even realize. We were one of the first in the space to do this. Now those are Freedom Series or Freedom Amber, that has L-theanine in it, ashwagandha, some functional elements, and then we have our Freedom Pale Ale, which is a beer also made without any gluten at all.

Deb:

Love it. I have the Freedom. Cali Pale Yep, I have that one.

Joe:

And the other benefit is through this third-party lad testing that we did, we noticed that all our beers without fruit have less than one gram of sugar. So anyone that has a reaction to sugar or that wants a low-sugar diet, I mean. Obviously beer doesn't really have any fat in it, so you have low fat, low sugar and all the carbs you're getting are from natural grains. So it's pretty powerful, and the ones with fruit just have the calories from the fruit in them, so they're going to be our higher calorie beers, but all those sugars come from the fruit themselves.

Deb:

But even that they're not super high in calories. I'm trying to think, I think-.

Joe:

No, like 99 is our sunshine state. I was going to say like the tropical IPA right.

Deb:

It's like under 100 for the whole can and it's so good it's so good. It's so good yeah.

Joe:

I've been pounding our beers lately.

Deb:

Have you.

Joe:

Yeah, they're in front of me all the time, so I'll go through Spurs. But Saturday I had four of them. I was just pouring it in a glass and you have it. And if you compare that at a bar or restaurant that has our beer to a regular one, you can't tell the people that are looking for a heavy IPA beer. You're going to feel the difference because I'll cause this natural sweetness to it and it's very calorically dense. So a double IPA, for example ours, is like 78 calories. A regular one that you get same ounces will be like 300. So it's significantly different. You have three of those and eat a burrito and wonder why you're out of shape. I mean, that's what my life was, that's what everyone I knew, that's what we did. That's not even crazy. That's not the crazy nights where you'd have a lot more.

Deb:

Right right. Have your relationships changed, friendships changed at all, since you've become more sober, more soberish?

Joe:

Yeah, it's a good question. I think I don't have any experience like losing friends.

Joe:

A lot of my friends were more actually into health and wellness than I was, so it's kind of cool to be able to compete with them, even at some events, or do events with them, which I never even thought I drinkers to begin with, like they weren't heavy drinkers. They don't necessarily go out just to do that. There's the exception, crazy friend, that we all have right, that's like the life of the party, crazy person. And that person hasn't changed, like we'll be out and you know, but he's fun to watch when he's doing that?

Deb:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wind him up? Yeah, yeah, but at this point in life it's like we have kids and, yeah, family, family, man, you're not, not the same.

Joe:

Yeah, and I guess like one last point I'll make is I started to do like an inventory of like my life and who I was drawn to and like who inspired me, and I was never the one of those guys. That's like I want to be like this person. I just wasn't. I was the opposite of that. I'm like idea of like these character traits that I admire from other people and very similar to the story I was starting to tell about the plant is that my dream was to be a supervisor at the plant, because that's all I saw. That was my entire environment. I didn't see beyond that Like that was it. That's the only thing. That was my world. I didn't know there was a marketing team at Ford until I happened to apply for the job and get in that role.

Joe:

The same thing happens for your friends and because of the power of the internet, you can be drawn to people and interests that are really kind of more of your spirit. And I started to take an inventory of like what are the key traits of these people that I like? And a commonality of all of them is like they either don't consume any alcohol or they rarely do, because you can't be at an elite level elite business level, elites, any level and be a regular consumer. Certainly you can drink in moderation, you can do that but you can't be a. I mean there's edge cases, right, but most of the time you're not going to be your best, you're going to have unrealized potential if you're sitting there consuming alcohol all day long.

Deb:

Yeah, unrealized potential. Yeah yeah, it's surprising. I didn't realize how many. All the top actors, all the top people, they're not drinking right, because? They can't you can't, you can't be at that level and be a drinker 100%.

Deb:

Joe, I absolutely love Go Brewing. Thank you so much for joining me today. I feel like I just I have so many more questions, but I don't want to keep you. I love what you're doing. I'm cheering you on from Kentucky and I'm so, so thankful for this lane that you are just moving ahead in in the non-alcoholic space.

Joe:

Well, thank you very much for your support and I love what you're doing, and we just launched in Kentucky for distribution, so Kentucky is something that just happened in the last few weeks since the last time we spoke. So, yeah, so spread the good word out. In Kentucky We'll be at stores out there. If we're not at stores, let me know, because the ability to make that happen can be accomplished pretty quickly.

Deb:

So what like Kroger Total Wine?

Joe:

We're in the Total Wines. Kroger is a little bit of a different animal. We're working on that for the fall.

Deb:

I'll look at Total Wine Hopefully we'll be in there.

Joe:

but Total Wine and if there's any local places that anyone listening to this, that's in Kentucky yourself a local bottle shop, a restaurant bar. We have distribution there and they could get the beer there very quickly. It's not through the mail, it's through a regular distribution partner.

Deb:

I'm so glad to hear that. I'm so glad to hear that I have a couple of restaurants in mind, for sure that I would love to get connected with you guys. So yeah it'd be wonderful to sit down and have go brewing with some Mexican food.

Joe:

Incredible. Oh, speaking of that, one last thing. We just launched this. This is not even available yet. It's our Mexican style beer, Salty AF Chelada.

Deb:

Nice Salty AF Chelada.

Joe:

Stop, look at that. Can I love it? Okay, so when's that one going to be available? Next week, next week? Oh my gosh, we got it today. We got it through our safety process and protocols and it'll be ready to go.

Deb:

Wow, wow, go, wow, wow, wow, wow. Okay, you heard it here first. Okay.

Joe:

That's right.

Deb:

Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, thank you Really appreciate it.

Joe:

Thanks for having me.

Deb:

Big time cheers to you for tuning into the Thriving Alcohol-Free Podcast. I hope you will take something from today's episode and make one small change that will help you to thrive and have fun in life without alcohol. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social, send up a flare or leave a rating and a review. I am cheering for you as you discover the world of non-alcoholic drinks and as you journey towards authentic freedom. See you in the next episode.