Charlotte startup wants to make it easier for you to get your hands on ‘whales’ -- rare beers and glassware
“Every beer enthusiast has a list of beers they probably consider ‘whales,'” said Mark Iafrate, the founder and CEO of Charlotte startup The Beer Exchange.
By “whales” he means hard-to-find beers, like special releases and brews from smaller breweries that don’t distribute nationally. (The term is a “Moby Dick” reference, for those of you who slept through that college English class.)
That’s the inspiration behind a new series of glassware called the “Whales Series,” a collaboration between The Beer Exchange and The Roaming Pint. The first glass of the series, which featured a humpback whale on a Teku glass, sold out in a matter of a couple days.
The second glass in the series, which features orcas, goes on sale Thursday.
The concept of “whale” beers also helped inspire Iafrate and his cofounders, Rethesh George of Charlotte and Luke Schmuecker of Corona Del Mar, Calif., to create The Beer Exchange in February 2014. The exchange offers a platform for people around the country — and even outside the country — to trade beers with each other.
The concept of trading beer isn’t new, but Iafrate, 28, realized that there didn’t seem to be a central place to do it. Trades were organized on beer forums, Reddit and other social media, he said.
People trade beer for two reasons, Iafrate said:
(1) To get beers they can’t get in their region. (Imagine if you lived in California and really wanted some NoDa Brewing Hop Drop ‘N’ Roll.)
(2) To get super-rare beers that rarely, if ever, hit store shelves. (Imagine special releases from breweries that are only available in limited quantities from the taproom.)
Through The Beer Exchange, users can search for beers and propose trades. They then coordinate with each other to make the trade happen and rate the experience.
“We expected we were going to get a couple hundred people or a couple thousand people,” Iafrate said. “We launched it and people really liked it.”
A little over a year later the site had 10,000 users and Iafrate, who graduated from Davidson College in 2010 and had spent his career at Charlotte startups, decided to do The Beer Exchange full time.
The company has since added new features, like the ability to buy beer from shops around the country (including Salud Beer Shop and Good Bottle Co. locally).
Another new feature is the glassware. The Beer Exchange had previously sold some glassware branded with its logo but wanted to do something special for this latest series.
Iafrate said the company had been thinking of playing off the idea of “whales” for a while, and glassware is becoming a “niche within a niche” in craft beer.
The Beer Exchange partnered with The Roaming Pint, a website started by Brian Devine and Maria Scarpello chronicling their journey to find great beer all over the country in an RV, to create the glass. Devine has a background in design and agreed to help design the glasses.
The Beer Exchange made 300 of the humpback whale glasses, the first in the series. The first 150 sold out online in less than two hours and the second 150 sold out in just a couple of days.
The whale designs are printed on Teku glasses, a stemmed glass and a flared opening that Iafrate says is good for just about any style of beer. And it looks fancy.
“I’m a huge beer nerd, I really am. I just love craft beer,” Iafrate said. “I really appreciate things that are unique and that look good, that have attention to detail, and that’s what these (glasses) are. We have a policy with The Beer Exchange to never put our brand on anything that we ourselves wouldn’t buy … and this is part of that.”
Photos: Eric Gaddy/Courtesy of The Beer Exchange
This story was originally published September 7, 2016 at 1:02 AM with the headline "Charlotte startup wants to make it easier for you to get your hands on ‘whales’ -- rare beers and glassware."