Creating Triple Bogey Beer with Geoff Tait
When I first met Geoff Tait he was running his fashion forward golf apparel company Quagmire. The business was flying and Geoff was hanging out at the Masters with golf icons Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus and partying with Kanye, Jay Z and John Legend. And then it all came crashing down.
Like any good entrepreneur, Geoff picked himself up, dusted off the disappointment and found a new venture to dive into. This interview is about that journey. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m an avid golfer. I had the good fortune to watch the growth of Geoff’s Quagmire brand and I remember the early days when he first introduced Triple Bogey as a beer for golfers. Recently I was on the course and one of my playing partners asked the cart girl specifically for a Triple Bogey. That’s when I thought that, though I don’t drink myself, you might like to hear the story of how Geoff went about creating a beer.
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Steve Waxman: I think the thing that's really been amazing about you is that you have a creative marketing mind. You have long been an entrepreneur and I want to delve into all of that. But I do want to start with the beer. Can you walk me through how one goes about creating a beer?
Geoff Tait: Sure, I'll give it my best. So I started the company, I guess it's been eight years now, so once Quagmire fell apart, there was some partnership stuff there with Bobby who you know and Eric Grundy over at Jaytex Group, we all walked away from each other so from there I said to my wife, what am I going to do next. I love beer. I've always loved beer. At Quagmire I was known as the beer drinking sales guy kind of thing and I said why not try to target a beer directly towards golf. That's what my background has always been. So I had to kind of learn the beer side of things. But, you know, all my buddies laughed at me man, everybody said, "What are you doing? You're going up directly against Molson and Labatt's," because they've kind of had that monopoly over the beer carts over the years. So a lot of guys had doubts. Even my family had a bit of doubt. But I said, you know what, if we market it right and we build the right relationships, we should be able to kind of take a small piece and we've been able to take a pretty good chunk, to be honest, and it's been fun.
Steve Waxman: Specifically though, how do you, given all the choices that are in the market, how do you come up with something that is unique not just brand wise but, I guess, in taste as well?
Geoff Tait: To be honest with you, we went right for the big boys. So we decided that with golf on a 30 degree hot summer day you're going to drink a lager. And lagers are mainstream. There's a lot of loggers out there. We kind of hit the market before all the other craft guys decided that it was cool to make a lager. They always thought you got to make it as hoppy as can be, you've got to kind of throw whatever ingredients you can in whether it be watermelon or chocolate or whatever, where we decided, well, let's go and make a lager and, you know, make a beer that people can actually drink and actually enjoy and be thirst quenching on the golf course. So, it was a no brainer. And all I love is loggers and we've got a light and amber and a regular lager, and then a non-alcoholic and a couple other things. But we decided, again, to go head to head with Coors Light, Canadian, Budweiser, Bud Light and everybody laughed at us but eight years later we've sold millions of cans.
Steve Waxman: Well how did you develop the recipe?
Geoff Tait: It took a while. I mean, it took a couple of months. You know, when you're developing recipes you don't take from other people but you kind of test other people's beer and other companies beer and I literally sat on my front porch and said I like this, I like that, how can we tweak this, how can we make this different, how can we give it more flavor and how can we make it a little sweeter? So, to be honest, there's no original recipe out there anymore. There's a ton of different things that everybody's just kind of making, throwing into the pot and brewing away but, obviously, everybody beer's original but it's just the tweaks that you make to make sure that it's the beer that you want. So, it took a couple months and we just did a few brews and finally landed on one that we liked.
Steve Waxman: So how are you doing the brews? Are you doing them in the house? Were you doing it in one of those brew-it-yourself places?
Geoff Tait: Well, I actually started with Great Lakes. I kind of went around and tried to find somebody that would brew for me before I kind of got into the whole thing myself. I went to a few different ones and landed at Great Lakes which is here in Toronto. I live in the Beaches so we're not far from there. I met with Peter, the owner of Great Lakes who is a great guy, and he kind of spun up a few things for us and did a few different recipes and we landed on the one that we liked. So it was right straight to the full brewhouse to make the samples and to find the recipe and luckily we had those guys to kind of help us do that.
Steve Waxman: So then what was the next step once you had the beer in the can?
Geoff Tait: Originally the beer was in a can. It was in a silver bullet so you had to make the graphics, figure out your logos. Our logo is a "T" and a "B," it's a plus three, it's triple bogey so it kind of all went together. We kind of really focused on the 19th Hole (a golf reference to going to the bar after a round). I put stickers on the very first cans that we ever shipped out. So I was there in the brewery just stickering all the cans and getting them out there and that was when we were selling to a few golf courses. There's no way that we could ever sticker our own cans now when we literally do over a million cans a year. But back then it was make a few skids, make a few cans of beer, put a few stickers on and see if it sells. And then we threw them in the back of my car and I delivered it myself and literally from start to finish, that can was made by me.
Steve Waxman: So, how many courses, originally, did you go to?
Geoff Tait:
I kind of leaned on my buddies. As you know, I've been in the golf business for years so I went to St. Thomas golf club where I knew the guy there where I used to work and, you know, a few others. And we went to, I'd say, about a dozen clubs at the beginning. And they all said "Yeah, sure, we'll try it," probably most of them not thinking that it was gonna do any damage to their other business but after year one we sold about 350k in our first year, and from there we actually jumped up to a million bucks worth of beer in year two. So that just shows kind of where we went from, from one year to the next and we've been growing ever since.
Steve Waxman: Was it going to be called Triple Bogey from the very beginning or did you have any other names that you were trying to hash out with?
Geoff Tait: It was always Triple Bogey. You know, obviously I sat there sat on my front porch and you go and look to see what's available too, right? So I went and bought TripleBogey.com. I think it cost me a couple thousand bucks to get the actual web address and make sure that I can get the trademark. That cost me another 10 grand because somebody else already had Triple Bogey. But it was all about kind of making sure you put all the pieces together. It didn't necessarily have to be the name that I landed on but there were a few other names in the mix, but because of Quagmire it kind of worked well because quagmires, you know the shit marsh, or whatever and that was our clothing back then and triple bogey is obviously not a great score but it's a beer for the golfers and a beer for everyone.
Steve Waxman: What were your initial marketing ploys to get the beer in people's hands once they were at the golf course?
Geoff Tait: Mainly samplings. I mean, you've got to go out and grind, right? So, you know, these guys that have started companies today, they think that they're just gonna slap a label on a beer can and it's gonna work for them and everybody's just gonna clean off the shelves at the LCBO and they're going to buy it everywhere. For us, that's not how it works and it's not how it works for anybody to be honest. So, it was me and my wife Megan so St. Thomas Golf Club wanted us to come down to do a member-guest or a men's night. We would bring our little bar, our little fold up bar and I'd be standing there pouring samples and everybody's like "Are you the owner", and I said yeah and I did that for years. I did it for probably four or five years. I was always out sampling myself and doing all the events and kind of grinding up until I kind of had kids, to be honest. And I had to get off the road a little bit because I was on the road every single day, every single night, and it took a lot of hard work and a lot of miles to do that so that was the main thing. And then we sponsored men's nights, men's leagues. We've spent a ton of money on prizes. You know, we just do things that kind of come from the heart, rather than the corporate's do just throwing money at things or whatever. And we make golf related prizes. We make all kinds of fun stuff and people seem to love it and for sponsoring their league, they're more apt to drink our beer.
Steve Waxman: Did you ever think at the beginning "Why should I be making a beer, there's so many beers out there does the world need another beer?"
Geoff Tait: Yeah, my buddy's always said that, to be honest. I think at the beginning, I remember I sat with Chris Tamas and Tyler Keenen, two of my good buddies and they laughed at me. I went to the can to take a leak and then came back and they just shook their heads to say "Really man, this is what you're doing?" I'm just like, "Yeah, I'm doing it. So, what other option do I have?" I didn't want to get back into the clothing business right away. I was kind of devastated by that. But people did say why are you getting into the busiest, most competitive market in the world really. I went from clothing to beer and there's not too many markets that are that competitive. But we're doing it.
Steve Waxman: Yeah, for sure. Well, look, you've had a long history with golf, and a long history of entrepreneurship, can you take us through the journey that you've been on to get to this point? Where were you born? What do your parents do? And what brought you into golf and then the businesses associated with that afterwards?
Geoff Tait: I hope you've got time for this. So, I grew up in St. Thomas, Ontario, just outside of it. My mom was a teacher and my dad worked for the government, for the unemployment side of the government and we just lived a nice, simple life, to be honest. We never wanted for anything but always had what we needed. My parents were members of the St. Thomas Golf Club back in the day. They got me into golfing when I was about six. So, I loved it. It was something to do. I would go there to play 36 and I'd eat hot dogs and drink milkshakes and my mom would pick me up after. So, I worked there for years. I worked there since I was 12 years old until I was 20. I worked there and I also worked at Redtail (Golf Club) under Greg Gladstone who is a good buddy of mine as well, and he's always been a great supporter.
Steve Waxman: I’m sorry, what were you doing at the golf courses?
Geoff Tait: At the beginning I was in the back shop, picking the range, doing all that stuff and then I was in the pro shop once I hit the age of 16. And then at Redtail I was doing much of the same. I was caddying, I was picking the range, I was doing whatever Greg needed me to because it was Redtail, right? So, it was a pretty cool place to be around with all those celebrities. That was back in the day when Sean Connery was coming in to play golf at Redtail. I hear that they're gonna make it the same again so we'll see what happens. From there I went to the Golf Management Program at Humber. Then I went over to Australia. I went to university there, got a business degree, started my first business and started a pant company, sold them in the markets, then a few shops there just to learn how to run my own business.
Steve Waxman: Hang on a second. Why did you go to Australia?
Geoff Tait: For school, university. I just wanted to get out of here and see what else was out there in the world. So I kind of traded my golf clubs for a surfboard and lived right on Bondi Beach and went to school and it was fantastic. And like I said there I was the beach pant guy which was cool and I got lots of stories but I can't tell you all those.
Steve Waxman: What does that mean the beach pant guy?
Geoff Tait: It was cool, man. There was the Bondi Beach market. There was a bunch of stuff down there and it was all transit people, right? It was all travelers. It was all whatever. And when we'd be at the bar after all these people will be like "Oh, there's the beach pant guy." So, I was selling, I was manufacturing and selling beach pants there. Remember Mod Robes back in the day? So they're just casual pants to go to the beach and it was a good little run, got me a few free beers and we had some fun. From there I came back home, took some rich kids on a golf trip off to down to Florida and in between that actually worked on cruise ships as a golf teacher. I taught golf on cruise ships and lived in Venezuela as well as at a university. I guess I was teaching kids how to act in the US kind of thing. It was more of a social studies kind of class or whatever. So then, the golf trip, took the kids around to TPC Stadium, Bay Hill, all these great golf courses and met Bobby Pasternak, who was my first real partner in crime and in business and I told him about my idea about Quagmire. Quagmire Golf was our new funky golf clothing line, kind of before its time. Now everybody's got young funky golf clothes. We were kind of one of the first. That was 2005 I think.
Steve Waxman: Well can you, can you talk to talk a little bit of a quagmire and what the concept behind it was and how it actually started.
Geoff Tait: So, it was young, funky golf, again, I used to make hats when I was in high school. Me and my buddy Dan actually would sew them watching Baywatch at our kitchen table kind of thing and we'd make hats and sell them from our lockers at school. So I always wanted to have a golf clothing line and I came up with the name Quagmire. I had all the concepts behind it. I figured I needed a business partner to kind of help me, launch it, money-wise or whatever. We started with 10 grand in our pockets. Bob had some pretty cool connections. His brother was a fitness trainer in LA, Halle Berry, Kanye West, Jessica Simpson all these guys so we thought we might be able to utilize that. And we did, we did a little bit. So yeah, I found a lady named Barb. She was down at Ossington and Queen (streets in Toronto). I went there and I said "I want to do this golf clothing line, can you help me design it?" So she helped me. It was called TerraCotta designs and her and I put together the first Quagmire line, a few pieces. But it was young, funky, fresh, it wasn't your typical polo or your dad's khakis and it was cool. It actually fit properly. It was fitted stuff that people could actually wear and not feel like they just came off the golf course with a big umbrella shirt on, or whatever. So we did that, and we ran with it for many, many years and then partnered with a company called the Jaytex Group, who's a huge distribution company. We got an IMG deal with Arnold Palmer through it. I got a call from Arnold Palmer's people, a guy named Jim Neish who said, "Would you be interested in coming down and meeting Arnold and the family? We'd like to make Arnold's brands a lot fresher and cooler." So, I did that. Went down to TPC Stadium and met with those guys and we had a great partnership with him and got a license deal. It was awesome. We were selling at JCPenney, Macy's, Nordstrom, all kinds of cool places down in the US, all manufactured in China at that time. A lot of the stuff before it was made in Canada. And then I went to the Masters with Arnold. We went to all kinds of different cool stuff. It was a dream come true that I was going to every party that Arnold Palmer was going to. I was invited too and sat with him and Jack Nicklaus at the Masters when the 2012 par three contest got rained out because he was playing in it. So we sat there and drank vodka and I listened to his stories for hours and hours and hours. It was incredible. So, we had a good run in business but we also had a good run in life and we met some pretty big stars. You've been in the music business. I've got a great story. Kanye West. He wanted us to help him with his stuff as well back in the day. And so Bob's brother knew him, so Bob set it up. So we went down to New York. We met Kanye a few times on a couple of different occasions and kind of sat with him. He wanted to have some flagship stores then New York and Miami and he wanted us to do the design and all that stuff, partially because of the Arnold Palmer thing and partially because of Bob's brother. We thought it might be a good fit. It never really amounted to anything only because we needed to have a couple million bucks to throw down and he wasn't willing to put his money in. But we partied with him. We partied like crazy. One day he was in the Mercer Hotel in New York and he said come on up for a meeting. So his manager came down to get us and we went up for a meeting and John Legend was sitting beside me on the couch and Kid Cudi walked through the door smoking a joint and Kanye was there doing us taping his album at the time. And then a guy walks in the door and he says, "Hey man." I said "Hey." He goes, "Hey, I'm Jay." I said, "Yeah, I know who you are." It was Jay Z. So I'm sitting in a room with Kanye, Jay Z, John Legend and Kid Cudi and drinking and doing whatever we needed to be doing. It was incredible. So all of this, I guess, short story, long story, whatever it is, it's the clothing, the beer everything's amounted to such great memories and such great things in my life that it's even more valuable than money. You only need money to live, right?
Steve Waxman: So, how much can you talk about, or what are you, can you say about how Quagmire ended? I mean, it sounded like you guys were on roll. Things were going to really happen. And then you were in the beer business,
Geoff Tait: Obviously, you know, Bob and I are both making a hundred something grand a year, we were driving BMWs and Lexus and whatever. It was good. I had a JC Penney P.O. sitting on my desk with them for 750 grand that I had to walk away from. So what happened was one partner didn't agree with another partner and wanted the other partner out of the business. I won't get into names or details on that. But basically, the guy with the money said if this guy is part of it we're gonna walk away. We're gonna shut this thing down or whatever type of thing it was. It was sad because it was just some bad business decisions that were being made.You know, we're selling Macy's and we're not making any money. That's not how you do business, right? So the bottom line was, the bottom line sucked, even though we're selling 3 million bucks worth of stuff, and somebody had to pay the price and we all paid the price. So, you know, I cried, I drank, I did whatever I needed to do to kind of get out of the funk of losing a business because you build it so high that and nothing comes out of it. And you get to a point in business where you think, oh, maybe I can sell it. You can sell the name, you can sell the brand but because of the way it all went down, nobody would relinquish their shares and nobody would give up what they had and what they thought they deserved, so it was just butting heads and I just walked away and said, basically, "F.U. guys and good luck and do what you can." So I'll say that we all are kind of friends, you know one guy, more than others. But at the end of the day it's the best thing that ever happened to me, to be honest. I'm having so much more fun doing this than when I was making shirts and hats and whatever. I'm going to eventually add that in the Triple Bogey line on the trademark, as well. So you'll see some pretty cool clothing coming out of this pretty soon but I wanted to get my foot on the gas with the beer first.
Steve Waxman: That's exciting because I have to say that the shorts that I got from you guys years ago are still in rotation after all these years. I absolutely love them. So, how long was it between the end of Quagmire and the light bulb that turns into Triple Bogey?
Geoff Tait: One year. So I had to take a little break. My wife was working. She was working at BDC. She worked for BDC media, but we couldn't survive in Toronto on one salary so I actually went and taught over at Durham College. I taught marketing, both the general business class and the Golf Management guys at Durham College in Oshawa, and I love that. It was great. In the meantime I was kind of building this plan behind the scenes. It wasn't as heavy duty as I thought it was going to be for school so I actually could put the plan together. It took me about a year from start to first brew and, like I said, eight years later we're selling millions of cans. Lots of draft. It's all good.
Steve Waxman: I've always admired how clever you are as a marketer. Do you have a particular philosophy as a marketer?
Geoff Tait: Thank you. I appreciate that, but I don't think so. I don't know. I don't know where it comes from. I just know that being genuine and being real and marketing towards people is, and to kind of, I wish I had a better answer for you. I think it's just the grass roots of it. You know, show a picture of my baby and then show a picture of the beer can kind of thing and people can actually relate to that, because they're living that life as well. It's not glamorous. It's not partying every night because I own a beer company and getting wasted every day. It's, hey, I'm still bouncing my kid to put her to sleep, kind of thing and having to walk my kid up to school and things like that. And I think that that's kind of what's missing. You know, there's a lot of beer companies that hire agencies and they just take a picture of the can that they're selling. They take it in different settings and nobody gives a shit about that, you know. You've seen a can once, why do you care if it's on the table here or if it's on a whatever over there. Yeah, you know, put some fun into it. Put some real life experience into it. And I love getting the people that are selling our beer, and back in the day selling our clothing, involved as well. Taking pictures of the beer cart girls doing all that stuff and they get so excited that they get to be part of the Triple Bogey Instagram or whatever, right? It makes them feel like they're attached to the brand and that makes them want to sell the brand more. And our customers are not just customers, they're our friends as well and I think that goes a long way.
Steve Waxman: Do you keep in your mind a picture of your customer when you are creating these things?
Geoff Tait: Oh, for sure, for sure. I mean, I don't even know what our demographic is these days because I thought it was just kind of going to be like the 20 to 40 year old. It was gonna be young, hip and cool. But to be honest with you, I get so many emails, "I love your Amber beer, where can I get it?" You know, 65 or 80 years old or whatever and that's cool with me too. Golf is golf and I think it's easy to kind of, I mean it's easier to market towards one thing rather than trying to be in general, the beer of everybody. I get to now be the beer of golf and that's what people call us and that's what we're excited about. But I think about what golfers. What will golfers want to do? What are the boys doing on boys weekend? What are the ladies doing on ladies night, drinking our canned wine or our beer, whatever, and marketing towards them.
Steve Waxman: So, are you exclusively in golf courses or are you on the shelves as well?
Geoff Tait: We're in the LCBO, we're in the grocery stores so we're in Loblaws, Sobey's, Fortino's, Zehrs. It kind of trickled over to that so at the beginning we were in golf courses and I didn't go to the LCBO on purpose. I wanted to make sure that we built a bit of a following before we went to the LCBO only because it would be sitting and collecting dust on the shelves. And that's what people think 'Oh, I'll build a beer and then I'll put it on the LCBO shelves and then everybody's got to buy it.' Well, that's not how it works and there is such great competition and it is, you know, a crazy world out there. Now the seltzer world and the beer world and all this stuff, vodka sodas and whatever everybody thinks it's just fun and easy to do but you've got to build a brand first. And so we're in a few hundred LCBO's but we usually put it in the LCBO because say Brendan Parsons at Listowel Golf Club has it and guys that are drinking there are asking where they can get it, let's put it in the LCBO in Listowel. So it's kind of a strategic thing where we make sure that it's going to sell and we can continue on the shelves at the LCBO. And we're in a few bars. Bars are big. A lot of bar owners love golf, they always have their own little golf tournaments and all that stuff. We haven't really put our focus on that because it is a very very busy place where everybody else is going. They're going to the bars, right? They're trying to sell to these bars and get on one of the six taps or eight taps or twelve taps. But we found ourselves in nice little niche business that's not as competitive as people thought, and we're selling a lot of goods,
Steve Waxman: Are you right across Canada?
Geoff Tait: Alberta, Manitoba Saskatchewan, Ontario for the time being, and then a little bit in the U.S..
Steve Waxman: Okay, so it is down there as well a little bit.
Geoff Tait: Got the trademark. I'm working on a few things in Florida. I had to sell a few beers down there to get the trademark so I own the name Triple Bogey in the States as well so I paid a big chunk of money to get that. You know, you need it to kind of have a universal brand or North American wide brand or whatever. But Ontario is our biggest, Alberta's probably number two, Manitoba and then a little bit of Saskatchewan. But there's lots more. B.C.'S next and then back out to the East Coast.
Steve Waxman: What about expanding the line? I mean, obviously, when I reached out to you I asked for some ice tea. What do you have? Do you have plans for expanding the line beyond what you have now? How many you've got, what, five items now?
Geoff Tait: There's regular, so premium lager, which is our flagship. I've got the light. I got an amber. We've got this. (holds up a can) I'm drinking this because it's 3:30 in the afternoon. Non alcoholic. It's Triple Bogey non alcoholic. It's .05. It tastes just like a beer. You should see all of the people that email us and say "Wow, your beer's are our favorite non alcoholic beer because it actually tastes like a beer, it doesn't taste like a watered down, whatever." I've got a seltzer, a lime seltzer and then I have canned wine. But the next step will be vodka something. It'll be gin something. It'll be something like that. But I mean we're selling so much of the green can right now, I don't want to take my finger off the pulse and I don't want to get too wide and too spread. But my wife drinks vodka sodas. Our good friends are good folks and socialites so we do a few trades here and there. So I'd rather instead of buying her vodka sodas I'd rather make them ourselves right, so we'll get there.
Steve Waxman: In the meantime, I'll drink other people's Arnold Palmers and wait for you to show up eventually.
Geoff Tait: Fair enough.
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If you want to find out more about Triple Bogey and their products, head over to triplebogey.com. In addition to information about their drinks, you’ll find a listing of all of the locations they are being sold. I’m told on good authority that the taste is great.