We Will Collective launches beer partnership for Iowa State fans
We Will Collective announced Tuesday that it has partnered with West O Beer to brew the Ames Lager, which will help promote and raise NIL funds for the Iowa State collective. We Will Collective Executive Director Brent Blum said the parties are still finalizing the revenue split but “it’ll be a few dollars per case.”
The collective hopes the beer will be available by the end of July in time for RAGBRAI, or Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. There will be a few stops in central Iowa, which means thousands of bikers will ride through Ames.
“While there will be a revenue piece that is great for us, more than anything we look at this as an exposure and a fan engagement piece,” Blum said Tuesday in a phone interview. “We’ve received more attention for this post on Twitter than anything we’ve done in our year-plus that we’ve been around up to this point.”
In the first four hours after We Will Collective announced its plans for Ames Lager on Twitter, the collective’s tweet had nearly 200,000 impressions.
“Optimistically for us, I think the aspirational goal would be six figures,” Blum said. “We’re not counting on that. Again, we’re almost using this as more of a marketing and a branding initiative than a revenue side.”
It’s the fourth collective nationally to announce a partnership for a co-branded beer, following The Horseshoe Collective at Boise State (The Horseshoe Golden Ale), The Swarm Collective at Iowa (SWARM Golden Ale) and Cincy Reigns at Cincinnati (Cincy Light).
“Kudos to Iowa and Boise and Cincinnati for having this idea,” Blum said. “We’re like, ‘Man, we’d be silly not to consider this.'”
Blum said the collective’s goal was to partner with a brewery for a drinkable beer that tells the collective’s story. He said West O Beer is owned by a couple Iowa State alums. Ames Lager will be an American Lager with an alcohol by volume that’s in the low-fours based on percentage.
There will be a QR code on the can that will direct consumers to We Will Collective’s website.
“Hopefully this is a bridge into a more important donation, which is those individual donations that really move the needle,” Blum said.
The collective wants the beer to be available statewide, too. Blum said it will be available in stores by mid-August in time for football season.
“This beer space is not brand new in NIL but I think we’re kind of tagging along,” Blum said. “We obviously saw success from our in-state friends at The Swarm Collective with the University of Iowa and for a lack of a better term, Iowa State fans were also thirsty for their own NIL beer.”
We Will Collective saw reception for Iowa collective
Setting aside the friendly rivalry banter, Blum said there were considerations regarding We Will Collective’s partnership with West O Beer given that it’s the second partnership between a collective and a brewery in the state.
“Our other hurdle was that Iowa already partnered with one of the larger brewers in the state so we had to find not only a brewer that would partner with us but also has some Iowa State connections because we also deal with the friendly rivalry in the state,” Blum said, laughing. “There’s some political stuff that goes on of Iowa State not wanting to support the Iowa NIL beer and Iowa fans not wanting to support the Iowa State NIL beer so it almost becomes a Twitter turf war but in the brewery world.”
Blum alluded to the saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
“I’m not going to lie, we absolutely did this based on the reception they got, which was overwhelmingly positive here in the state of Iowa,” Blum said.
Blum said the most time-consuming part was working with the university and its multimedia rights holder LEARFIELD to ensure it navigated the licensing component correctly without infringing upon any trademarks.
“As a university, as a collective, we know at Iowa State, we’re not going to be able to win the NIL battle with just pure resources so we gotta be all going the same direction,” Blum said. “It was important for me and our team to make sure Iowa State was comfortable with what we were doing, that LEARFIELD was comfortable with what we were doing and we’re not infringing on any brand issues.”
He said the next conversation is to see if Ames Lager could be sold in Iowa State athletic venues, depending on the university’s current beverage contracts.
‘We do have people who like to slam beers’
Blum described the hope that consumers will see Ames Lager at stores, where they’ll either have a baseline understanding of the collective or the curiosity to look into it further.
“I think we’re getting to a point in NIL where people are realizing that it isn’t all bad news and there’s some really good things happening,” Blum said. “We like to share that we’ve worked with over 30 nonprofits in the Ames area and have helped over 100 Iowa State student-athletes and ‘doing things in a positive way’ that impacts everybody in a win-win situation with youth organizations in the area and all sorts of good stuff.”
Blum said We Will Collective’s goal is to create programming around Ames Lager, such as a hypothetical March Madness-related promotion where the collective receives twice as much revenue from the beer sales during March.
“We like to say that we know the Iowa State people and we don’t have many oil tycoons, if any, but we do have people who like to slam beers,” Blum said. “So let’s know our audience and know our supporters.”