There’s a sign in the Brewlihan taproom that reads like one you might see in an elementary school classroom: “Everybody love everybody.”
There are lessons we learn as children but sometimes forget as adults, and it’s reasonable to wonder whether we’re more likely to overlook them amid our increasingly isolated, mediated lives. But at this unusual meadery in Oakland Park, Florida, cofounder John Hoolihan is certain that his growth is based on prioritizing some pretty fundamental rules about how people ought to treat each other.
That includes going the extra mile for members of their bottle club, fostering conviviality in the taproom, and giving customers plenty of opportunities for feedback. And, last but not least, remembering to thank them all.
“High-quality communication and just being grateful are two things that we do that produce the most amount of momentum in the world,” says Hoolihan, a former science teacher.
John and Stacey Hoolihan founded Brewlihan as a members-only, club-based business in August 2022—an outgrowth of John’s love for beer, mead, and the other people who love it, too. Members of the club—called the Lab, riffing on his science-teacher background—want strong, flavorful, still meads of the sort that got Hoolihan excited about making them in the first place. Even so, he developed a series of lighter, sparkling meads called Serums, initially for the taproom that opened in March 2023.
Demand for Serum grew, and Hoolihan saw an opportunity to expand via distribution. In mid-2024, after some careful planning, Brewlihan added tank capacity—and practically overnight, it went from about 10 barrels of mead per month to about 100 barrels.
“And we’re just so appreciative for the people that are making this dream come true for us, and keeping us so busy,” Hoolihan says. “I don’t remember what we used to do to keep ourselves busy at 10 barrels.”
When a small craft brewery grows quickly, people often complain that the product isn’t what it used to be—“that’s a tale as old as time,” Hoolihan says. “But we’re really proud of the fact that we haven’t lost a beat. And, if anything, I think that we continue to get better, just because we’re out here experimenting and really getting feedback from a lot of people to make sure that we’re creating a product that is enjoyed by all.”
From Teacher to Maker
Hoolihan’s route to mead began with beer—waiting in lines at J. Wakefield in Miami and “meeting awesome people.” He loved craft beer “not only for the flavor,” he says, “but as a science teacher, I found a unique interest in the experimentation side—controlled variables, etcetera—and really just was an all-around tinkerer.”
He threw himself into homebrewing, firing up the smoker and having friends over to his garage every couple of weeks. Later—on one of those nights waiting in line at Wakefield, sharing beer with fellow geeks—somebody brought around some mead. It was the first time Hoolihan had ever tasted one.
“I immediately was impressed and almost speechless when it came to the amount of flavor that was present,” he says. “It is just an awesome beverage in a shared atmosphere. … Whenever you bring out a bottle, it always does exactly what it did to me. And it was just this kind of mind-explosion moment.”
He immediately began trying to re-create Schramm’s The Statement, a much-loved melomel packed with Balaton cherries. “Made my first mead and failed gloriously,” Hoolihan says. “Thank God I had honest friends that were like, ‘Hey, this reminds me of medicine.’ Somebody even called it ‘lean.’”
He didn’t give up. Instead, he sought help online, finding a mentor in award-winning meadmaker Ryan Carlson. “He gave me his time and sent me a bunch of podcasts that I devoured, taking notes, and just kind of making sure that I was retaining a bit of the information that was coming. Because it comes so quickly, sometimes you miss nuggets that can separate good from great.”
Hoolihan took those details and applied them with the methodical, scientific approach that he knew—always as a hobbyist. “This was never meant to be a business,” he says. But he won a devoted local following anyway, winning multiple people’s choice awards at local homebrew events and competitions. That included J. Wakefield’s 2019 WakeFest, where Brewlihan was the first homebrewer invited because he’d won their homebrew competition.
Hoolihan was building the kind of momentum that inevitably gets a hobbyist to consider making the leap. Much of that demand came from a secondary market that doesn’t fret over whether you’re operating a legal business.
“People were hitting us up on social-media channels asking, ‘How do we get this bottle that you poured at WakeFest?’” Hoolihan says. “And really quickly, my answer was always, ‘You can’t. I’m not licensed. This is a hobby. Sorry!’ And when you tell people no, they find a way. And sometimes, in sales and marketing, saying no is a really great strategy because it makes your consumer or the person want it even more. That was never really the intent. I never wanted to kick the ball down the court.”
At the time, Hoolihan was an elementary-school assistant principal. He says he remembers looking at Stacey one day about four years ago and saying, “Hey, bottles of Double Pear Vanilla are selling for over $600 on the secondary market. … If you give me your blessing to take this to the next level, I promise, we’ll never fail as a direct result of a lack of effort on my behalf.”
They found their small location, and they got some critical support from the local government and community. “And it has kind of snowballed,” Hoolihan says, “into the greatest accident that has ever occurred in my life.”
Growing Around the Lab
It took longer than he expected to build out the space and line up permits. “I never thought 18 months would be the required amount of time to get up-and-running and be able to put our first drop of honey into tanks,” he says.
A rezoning to accommodate the taproom took another six months—but they made the most of it. “We leveraged that gift of time, if you will,” Hoolihan says. Their scattered cadre of eager fans—Untappd raters, bottle traders, and mead lovers attuned to the secondary market—“were scouring the internet for bottles from whatever sources they could find.”
They used that time to build a wait list and a mailing list, and to “let them know that their commitment to us would be reciprocated with an advance opportunity to join a membership,” he says. Stacey—a full-time web developer and data engineer—built the website, and they launched the club in August 2022.
“As soon as we were licensed, we opened up on one of the platforms where people could buy our stuff,” Hoolihan says. Within an hour, 250 people had signed up. “I remember kind of screaming over to her and saying, ‘Shut it off! Shut it off! I don’t know if we can even fulfill this amount.’”
Having that initial pent-up demand was helpful, and the club allowed them to meet their early goals in a planned way. “The membership itself would generate enough revenue that we were able to pay all of our fixed costs for the facility on the very first day,” Hoolihan says. “So, from a business perspective, it made life really easy because I didn’t have to stress about, ‘Do we have enough income from the local community?’” Early on, the club carried the business. “We could put out 500, 600 bottles of mead that we were selling at $45 a bottle, on average, and they would sell out within minutes.”
The Lab would prove to be an ideal way to pivot from the hobby and start the business on solid ground. “The club is a fantastic place for anyone who is reading through your magazine and saying, ‘How do I turn a passion into a profession?’”
And that club and its members are still the heart of the business that’s grown around them. Before they opened the taproom, the Lab was responsible for about 90 percent of the meadery’s revenue, Hoolihan says. Today—now that they’ve scaled up Serum for distribution—the club is about 10 percent of revenue, distribution is about 85 percent, and the rest comes through the taproom.
As Brewlihan grows, Hoolihan says, his goal is to be able to offer more of those coveted still meads via distribution. “But right now, our focus has been scaling Serum.”
Injecting the Serum for Growth
Early on, Hoolihan says, he knew he wanted Brewlihan to do more than make sought-after bottles of boysenberry-laden, barrel-aged melomel and the like. While they waited to open the taproom, he was tinkering with lower-alcohol meads.
“I wanted something that set us apart from anybody else that was making low-alcohol sparkling mead,” he says. “And I felt that coming up with a sub-brand that was produced under Brewlihan would help to kind of solidify our place in the marketplace.”
It would prove to be a smart bet. Building relationships through the more sought-after meads also helped line up a major boon—a copacking arrangement through which Brewlihan produces a white-label version of Serum for a larger company. While he can’t disclose those clients, Hoolihan says that they’re in a place to help “put mead on the map.” Today, that copacking arrangement accounts for about 90 percent of their distribution.
To any brewery that distributes, 25 barrels a week won’t sound like much. “But we have one employee,” Hoolihan says. Besides himself, “we have a cellarman who works part-time, and I have two fantastic buddies who are retired, and they hang out here and help out. … I am the most fortunate person in the world because the amount of product that is coming out of this 1,600-square-foot location is absolutely astonishing.”
For Serum’s mead base, Hoolihan uses a clean-fermenting palmetto honey sourced from a local beekeeper. While he started out by getting his honeys from a larger broker, he switched to the local source two years ago after seeing an ad on Facebook Marketplace. Back then, Hoolihan says, he was buying 24 buckets at a time—but he was already working on plans to scale up. “I said, ‘We’re going to need more, and here’s my expected amount that we’re going to need. Can we grow together?’ And since then, it’s just been almost a Hallmark story.”
That beekeeper has become the kind of reliable partner that can be hard to find when starting a business. “Every month he’s bringing 72 buckets through our front door and bringing them right to our storage, and we essentially buy his entire crop every time he has it. … He comes in, he goes, ‘Oh, I used all that money from last month and I bought 200 new bee boxes.’ So, he’s growing right along with us.”
Hoolihan ferments that palmetto base with a clean-fermenting yeast—a house strain of DV10, which can work at a range of temperatures. “I basically create a super-clean base, and that base acts as my canvas,” he says.
A typical base of SG 1.055–1.058 (13.6–14.2°P) will ferment down to 0.998–1.000 (~0°P), for an ABV of about 7.5 percent. Then they stabilize it and add fruit to secondary. “So, this gives us a lot of opportunity to play,” Hoolihan says.
With a range of tank sizes, they can split batches and add different fruits, spices, or other flavors—and they’re fortunate, he says, to have access to “supremely good fruit. … We are definitely a high price point, but we use the best of the best ingredients. There’s no syrups, there’s no top-note extracts going on over here. Everything is real natural fruit, real natural flavor.”
Variety is part of the appeal—Brewlihan has produced more than 65 different flavors of Serum over the past three years. There may be a dozen different Serums pouring in the taproom at any given time, from Cucumber Lime and Blueberry Mojito to Boysenberry Peanut, Mango Lime Habanero, and Strawberry Marshmallow.
“At some point, I’m like, ‘I’ve done it all.’” That’s when Hoolihan taps into the hive mind, so to speak. “And I’ll throw up a post on social media, and our members will have 100 new concepts.”
Not all those ideas will work, but they serve as creative inspiration for Hoolihan while letting his customers know they’re part of the process.
“Listen to the people that are supporting you,” he says. “I know that as a creator, you have to have thick skin. You know that not everything you make is going to resonate with every audience. But I think that it’s super- important to listen to what they want. … If making this flavor is going to make you happy and make you realize how much Brewlihan appreciates you, then, by all means.”
“Unreasonable Hospitality”
The taproom is weekends-only, and space is at a premium.
“We wrap up on Sunday night with bar service,” Hoolihan says. “Flip over a couple tables, and everything in this facility is on wheels—it’s poetry in motion. It’s almost like when a band sets up, and you have all the roadies on, and everybody’s steering something in one direction. We turn this place into a manufacturing facility Monday through Thursday—throw the mop on the floor a couple times over, and nobody would imagine it.”
While it’s not a classroom, a different sort of education happens in the taproom. Nearly every day it’s open, Hoolihan says, someone comes in and says, “I don’t know what mead is, but my friend told me this place is awesome.’” That’s one reason he sees plenty of room for growth. “There is such an untapped market when it comes to people in the world that enjoy a fine beverage,” Hoolihan says. “And we’re doing our best to make a product that is approachable by all.”
Then there are the people who’ve tried mead—at a renaissance fair, say—and didn’t like it, but their friend told them they had to try one at Brewlihan. “We send them out believers,” Hoolihan says.
One way they win that conversion is by offering a wide range of meads that vary in strength, sweetness, and flavor. From 5 percent ABV up to 16 percent ABV, traditional meads, those packed with local fruit, and more. “There’s a spicy mead on draft at all times,” Hoolihan says. “We love our habañeros here. But my goal as a creator-producer is to make something for everyone, from wild to mild.”
What sells in the tasting room is often the “polar opposite” of what the club wants, he says. “It really works out well, so that we’re not stuck in this, ‘We always make the exact same thing’ kind of pattern.” So, they can produce both a dry, traditional mead aged in rye barrels and a thick, viscous blackberry mead aged in brandy and whiskey barrels, and they know that each has an audience.
Whether it’s in the taproom or the club, Hoolihan credits their success to what he calls “unreasonable hospitality”—and he strongly recommends the book of that title, written by Will Guidara. Happy customers who feel like they’re a part of something tend to do the kind of marketing that money can’t buy—wherever they are.
“What I didn’t realize as a homebrewer … was that there was a ravenous demand internationally,” Hoolihan says. “We have members in the U.K., we have members in the Netherlands, we have members in China and South Korea. And they get this product, and when they’re happy with a membership, they become an ambassador for your brand—and without being on payroll. They’re still out there and rubbing elbows with their friends that are equally as passionate about craft, and … that has opened up the doors for distribution internationally.”
Meanwhile, Hoolihan takes pride in digesting feedback from club members. “I love a good survey,” he says. “And you have to have really thick skin to put it out there because you know that it’s easier for some people to talk about negatives than it is to talk about positives. But we learn from our audience.”
Even before they launched the Lab, the Hoolihans sent out a survey via social media to ask fans about their favorite bottle club, what makes that club different, and what they would want to see from Brewlihan’s. “And I can’t tell you how many people reached back out and they were like, ‘Hey, no one’s ever asked us this.’”
His response: “I need somebody to tell me what they want. Yes, I know what I’m passionate about, but if I bury my head in the sand and I don’t listen to anybody… well then, I’m going to be unemployed, and this is easily going to fail.”
Some members respond at length, and Hoolihan says he reads them all—but this past year, they also used AI to consolidate the responses into the major points. They reviewed those points and published them for the members.
“It’s an awesome, rewarding process, because we’re seeing the benefit of putting ourselves out there and being humble, but also being vulnerable,” he says. “It takes a lot to sit there and read where somebody’s unhappy.” You have to try to remove your ego from it, he says, and to realize that the feedback represents “their lived experience. And it’s my job to develop systems when it comes to everything that we do [to find] momentum in areas where you didn’t see it. And it just comes by listening.”
One example of a change that came from that feedback: Moving from 16-ounce to 12-ounce cans of Serum. “Everybody said, ‘Hey, we love these Serums. The flavors are great, but 16 ounces may just be a little too much unless I’m sharing it with somebody.’ And we said, ‘Oh, that’s an easy tweak.’ It also helps us to reduce cost to consumer, and everybody’s happy.”
The Human Connection
The Lab has a school-inspired theme that extends to a “graduation party” at the end of the year. “It’s our opportunity to throw the best party that we can for these people because they have absolutely changed my life,” Hoolihan says. “And not a day goes by that I take that for granted.”
Available at the party are about 20 previously unreleased meads—“all variants, all special, barrel-aged,” Hoolihan says. “We flip the taps every hour. There is a set of magnums that make their way around every 25 to 30 minutes, that changes. It is a massive undertaking.”
Members fly in from around the country for the Saturday event (and Sunday hangover brunch). The members pitch in, too, helping out with setup and pouring. “They’re all bigger than just a member,” Hoolihan says. “They’re part of the brand, and we wouldn’t be where we are without them.”
Meanwhile, Hoolihan says, he also sees room to grow locally—for example, by producing a special bottle to commemorate Oakland Park’s upcoming centennial. “These are the ways that we become more entrenched within our local community,” he says. “We have a name amongst those that—I call them the hyper-consumer, the person that’s following every brewery and meadery on Instagram, and they’re aware of all the releases. Those people know about us, but the people that are three streets away don’t know about us. So, we still have tons of opportunity for the brand itself to continue growing.”
While mead is a niche that attracts a passionate type of consumer, growth will come by inviting more people to try it. For Hoolihan, that involves a level of service that includes listening to all customers and expressing gratitude. That’s something he brings up in the context of once-popular craft breweries that have had to close in recent years.
“I’m just seeing doors shuttered on places that made me fall in love with it,” he says. “And I think somewhere along the way, our industry has moved a little bit away from people.”
The pandemic made it easier to buy special beers and other beverages online. “We utilize those platforms,” Hoolihan says, “but those platforms also killed lines. And lines were where I met some of the best people that I have had the pleasure of having drinks with. … It was these people that had hearts of gold and were super-passionate about it. And you couldn’t help but be excited because they were excited about something. That authentic connection that we had [goes] out the door when I can hit refresh on an app and buy it in two seconds. I love the convenience factor—trust me, from a business perspective, I see it.”
In the taproom, meanwhile, Hoolihan says he still sees those authentic connections happening. “And I don’t know the exact formula or recipe, but I can tell you that it is personnel and people-related. Our bar constantly has strangers talking to one another.”
Even when turning his hobby into a business, Hoolihan says, he never planned for growth.
“We’re here because this was something that I was passionate about, and I will remain passionate about,” he says. “There are a lot of incredible producers—whether it’s beer, wine, mead—but what really is going to set you apart from everybody else is how you treat people and remembering that we’re about authentic human connection. And in a time where there are political issues going on—where there’s just disagreement in general, where the news publishes all of the negative—I think it’s our job to be the positive. It’s giving people an opportunity to sit down and realize that we have far more in common as people than we do things that make us different.”