Fish-flavored beer sounds more fishy than tasty or refreshing. But for craft beer startup Talea, a collaboration with Fishwife in August for a “Super Smoky Lager” inspired by Fishwife’s tinned fish turned out to be a winner—and a perfect example of how the New York brewer is hooking up with like-minded direct-to-consumer brands to boost awareness and drive sales.

Indeed, out of every marketing channel that Talea uses, brand partnerships are among the most impactful, according to Talea’s co-founders, Tara Hankinson and LeAnn Darland, who founded Talea as New York City’s first women-owned brewery in 2018 and launched its first product in 2019.

The co-founders “both felt that there was a huge gap in the market in terms of craft beers speaking to non-beer bros,” Darland said in an interview. “So we created Talea—which is a portmanteau of our two first names—to fill that need in the market.”

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Talea is only sold in New York, with the founders saying that they’re building Talea’s brand within the state before expanding. Talea beers are sold in retailers such as Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods and it has a robust direct-to-consumer business via its New York City taprooms and a website that offers beer shipping within New York.

Packaging and collabs

Talea’s founders were intentional about their target audience from day one. “We always wanted to have more intriguing, playful, thoughtful, gender-neutral packaging designs that stood out from other craft beers on the shelves,” Darland said. 

Talea has been able to differentiate itself via packaging. Typical craft beer designs feel more masculine, Darland said, often portraying images such as zombies, cartoons, or “sporty” labels, whereas Talea’s packaging looks more like a canned wine or hard seltzer, with pastel colors and bubbly fonts.

The founders still wanted an economical way to get the word out about the brand and its values. They found the answer in brand collaborations—specifically, co-branded products and events with some of the hottest DTC brands in the market today. In addition to Fishwife, Talea also recently partnered with soda brand Olipop on co-branded beers and events. And more DTC partnerships are in the works. 

Not only do the collab posts on social media with these brands perform much better than the average Talea post (as Talea’s social media consultant Kendall Dickieson said in an interview, “it’s night and day”), but they also increase revenue for the brand and help it sell its beers faster, Hankinson said.

A standard 20-barrel batch of Talea beer sells out in roughly eight to 12 weeks, but the collab beers sell out faster, usually within two to three weeks. 

Talea’s sales volume jumped 160% from 2021 to 2022, according to figures shared by Craft Business Daily. Sales at grocery stores reached $500 million in the 52 weeks ended Sept. 8, up 23% from the year-earlier period, according to NielsenIQ data provided to Ad Age by Craft Business Daily.

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Talea inserts itself “in the conversation of these brands that have really cult followings,” Dickieson said. Consumers get really excited when the brand they love expands into a new format, such as beer. That excitement helps Talea’s brand awareness too, she said. 

The Super Smoky Lager was inspired by “the delightfully campfire-y flavors of Fishwife’s tinned fish,” according to an Instagram Collabs post from both companies. 

The Fishwife partnership “started as a respect and interest in the product, and also a love of their packaging,” Hankinson said in an interview. Plus, she pointed out, they’re also a female-founded brand just like Talea; and they have “a really fast-paced growth trajectory.”

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Talea’s founders said the brand seeks out collab partners with shared values and similar audiences. That includes female-founded brands and those that uphold business practices that Talea believes in. (Talea and Fishwife both made Interbrand’s 2023 Breakthrough Brands list.) Talea’s upcoming collabs include DTC seasoning brand Fly by Jing and Tcho chocolates. 

For the Super Smokey Lager packaging, Talea partnered with Fishwife’s illustrator and added in some of Talea’s typography. Talea also put on a Fishwife x Talea dinner party in its Williamsburg, Brooklyn taproom to celebrate the beer’s rollout.

“When we partner with DTC brands who don't have a physical space, it’s an opportunity for them to bring their brand to life in … our taprooms, and for their customers to get to directly engage with a manifestation of what that brand would do if they had a physical space,” Hankinson said.

Talea uses organic Instagram and TikTok posts, as well as some influencer and email marketing, to promote its brand partnerships, Dickieson said. Instagram’s “Collabs” feature is particularly useful. For instance, Fishwife’s Instagram Collab post performed 1,458% better than the average Talea Instagram post based on what Dickieson called “vanity metrics,” such as likes.

Strawberry Vanilla Cream Ale

The Olipop and Talea co-branded beer, which debuted with a Talea Williamsburg taproom event on Sept. 9, was arguably an even bigger success.

“Strawberry Vanilla is one of [Olipop’s] top sellers, and so we took a cream ale for a base and added strawberry and vanilla, and it’s this beautiful pink hue,” Darland said of the Olipop beer.

Getting Olipop’s audience exposure to the Talea brand “is huge for us,” Darland said, especially because some Olipop fans aren’t exactly beer people to begin with and hadn’t previously heard of Talea.

Olipop’s Instagram Collab post announcing the co-branded Talea beer was one of its top-performing posts in the past three months, despite Olipop having roughly 236,000 Instagram followers and Talea only netting 25,100, according to an Olipop spokesperson.

For context, in the past three months, Olipop had also posted about its pop-up with Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila and about its merch collab with the shorts brand Chubbies. The Olipop and Talea collab post reached around 200,000 accounts that weren’t already following Olipop, and around 7,000 people shared the post, Olipop’s spokesperson said.

For Talea’s part, Hankinson said it was “our best-performing post ever in terms of likes and shares and comments.”