San Diego’s Modern Times Beer became the most funded brewery on crowdfunding site Kickstarter, raising more than $65,000 in a springtime campaign. Their campaign managed to raise $25,000 beyond their $40,000 goal.
Modern Times Beer tasting room in Point Loma, San Diego.
Founder Jacob McKean explains that six months of traditional fundraising got them enough capital to get Modern Times Beer off the ground. “But by working on the crowdfunding campaign, we could make Modern Times much more than just the bare minimum. We could make it a truly spectacular space, a producer of devastatingly tasty sours, and a metronomically consistent producer of high quality beer,” he sates.
They were seeking $40,000 in pledges to build a creative tasting room, purchase a truckload of used wine and spirit barrels and acquire precision lab equipment. They offered some radical rewards to help make the campaign a success, including a slew of one-of-a-kind experiences that go well beyond the standard Kickstarter rewards. Rewards ranged from Brewery tours ($5 pledges), to unique t-shirts ($25-30 pledges), to Designing and brewing your beer at Modern Times Beer ($5000 pledges). To view their campaign and video go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jacobmckean/modern-times-beer-building-a-fermentorium.
They opened their new tasting room, Lomaland Fermentorium, in August. It’s decorated with a 21-foot-high mosaic, constructed from 10,000-plus Post-it Notes, that pays homage to the Jeff Koons sculpture of Michael Jackson and his beloved pet monkey, Bubbles. http://moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room
Their next big endeavor was getting their core beer into cans utilizing a Cask semi-automated manual canning system. Their cans hit local stores in late September.
