November 16, 2011

Red Nova Labs Hosting Wilderness Brewery Party

Brewery thanks backers with beer-sampling celebration

Westwood, Kan. — Wilderness Brewery surpassed what might be the greatest hurdle of any startup: raising capital. In honor of the brewery raising $41,099 through its Kickstarter campaign, fellow Kansas City startup Red Nova Labs is hosting a party on Nov. 18 to celebrate the achievement.

Wilderness Brewery cofounders Mike Reinhardt and Nate Watson will be serving a variety of their beers at the party, giving many of the people who made their dream a reality the chance to sample the type of beers they will serve at the brewery. Guests who donated to the project will also receive their gifts, which include t-shirts, bumper stickers and personalized pint glasses.

“We had one guy give up drinking for a month and pledged the money he saved to the brewery, and we didn’t even know him,” Reinhardt said. “We didn’t know many of our backers, many of whom live in the Kansas City area. This is a chance to meet them and thank them for their support, and for many, it will be their first chance to sample our beer.”

Reinhardt and Watson are both home brewers and decided over a year ago that they wanted to start selling their brews. While home brewing is legal, you have to be licensed to sell your beer. The college friends decided that they wanted to open a small brewery – they call it a boutique – and they decided Kickstarter was the perfect platform to raise money.

After months of research, Reinhardt and Watson found that they needed at least $40,000 to open a brewery, and so that is the amount that they set as their goal. On Kickstarter, ventures have a designated length of time to reach their goal, and if they don’t, they’ll get nothing.

As the campaign started, Reinhardt and his wife moved from their home in California to Kansas City, spreading the word along the way. In the first 65 days, they raised nearly $35,000, but with one day left to go, they still needed $5,000 to reach their goal.

“I was terrified, trying not to be pessimistic, trying to be realistic,” Watson said. “I had in my mind there’s a distinct possibility it might not happen, but we were going to do everything in our power to make it happen.”

Thanks to several last-minutes donors, Wilderness Brewery met its goal with 372 people backing the project. Since they reached their goal on Aug. 4, Reinhardt and Watson have been filing paperwork to get licensed in Missouri and looking for a space. They are still 9-12 months from opening their brewery, so Friday may be the only chance to try their beer in the next year.

The invitation-only private party for Kickstarter backers will be held in Red Nova Labs discovery lounge, located in Westwood, Kan.

About Red Nova Labs
Red Nova Labs was founded and self-funded in 2009 as a web development and marketing agency as well as a technology think-tank, creating original, cutting-edge systems for web and mobile. On the service side, the company supports interface design, backend programming and online marketing. On the product side Red Nova Labs invents, builds and launches its own web-based platforms for various applications and vertical markets. To support both business models, its growing team of development engineers conceives resourceful code generators which add practical ease to complex programming—enabling unprecedented speed in creating vibrant, multidimensional environments and utilities. Once a product is launched, each business operates autonomously as an independent unit, with full engineering and marketing support from Red Nova Labs on the back end. The company is open to collaborative opportunities.