Mash Gang was founded in 2020 by Michael Baggs along with friends James Loveday, Jordan Childs, who is also head brewer and a brewer of the year award nominee, and Alex Loveday.
The low and no brewing brand has built a strong following since its launch, but does not have a dedicated brewery, instead working with partners to brew at different sites and remote working for head office.
Over the past five years, Mash Gang has worked with some well-known breweries across the UK and US, including Leeds-based brewer Northern Monk, which helped the founders hone the brand’s brewing technique in its infancy during the pandemic.
Baggs says: “We realised that working with partners, we could scale up and down quite quickly and that different partners are really good at different things; we are controlled chaos.
“We will never have a brewery or an office. We work with partners, and we outsource everything, and we trust them implicitly to do these things.
“Because of that, it gives us this wonderful open natural relationship with people. But we tend to work with people who we like and they like us.
“I have a rule that I only want to work with people I would sit down and have wings and watch TV with at a bar and that’s the cornerstone of how the businesses was founded.”
Bringing a wealth of experiences from a variety of industries, including music, technology and neuroscience, Baggs used his background in building communities and social media buzz to launch the business.
“We were the first non-alcoholic brewery to be on TikTok as an official partner and built around 15,000 followers in four months”, he tells The Morning Advertiser (The MA).
Driving community and love
This strong sense of community and working with decentralised power remains a core principle for Mash Gang, he continues: “Our community is everything to us. Without the community, we are like any other brand.
“If we run paid media and anyone comments making disparaging remarks about non-alcoholic beer, they will get half a dozen responses from people in our community [explaining] why they are wrong.
“We had 3,000 pieces of user generated content posted about us on Instagram in the first two years and we’ve built the brand around this.
“Half of the business is there to drive community and fandom and love, and the other half is making beer that people drink every day, really well.
“We do it from a place of being massive beer fans and just massive fans of creating good content. We do things with massive passion and people respond to that.”
Passion is a key ingredient for success when it comes to non-alcoholic brewing, Baggs adds, advising anyone coming into the industry to do so because they love beer or because they are “incredibly curious” about doing something new and different.
“There are too many people in brewing that are passionate for you to be able to wing it.”
Mash Gang co-founder Michael Baggs
He continues: “In craft brewing, we’re meant to be more ‘Wild West’, we’re meant to be exciting and different.
“We’ve had some misses [and we have had to learn a lot], but if you don’t have the zeniths and nadirs of trying to figure out what you’re doing and experimenting with craft and being an amateur and just being really excited about doing stuff, it doesn’t work out.
“We are slowly becoming professionals, but we’re amateurs at heart in that everything we do, we do because we love it and it’s exciting and we want to learn.
“There are lots of people looking at non-alcoholic now because they think there’s a magic bag of money at the end of the rainbow and there’s not. There really isn’t.
“You have to work incredibly hard to get anything, and the success you get is built around community and respect. There are too many people in brewing that are passionate for you to be able to wing it.”
One of the highlights of Baggs’ time at Mash Gang so far has been the success of its stout campaign in 2022, which it named ‘the summer of stout", following the launch of Anxiety, its first mass produced stout.
Business strategy
Baggs explains: “Stout doesn’t sell well in the summer. And [the release of Anxiety] kept being delayed, then when it finally came out, everyone loved it.
“The response was great, so Jordan went off and produced more stouts, and this was in May or June time. I initially told him ‘you’re losing the plot, we’re not going to sell all this stout in summer’, but it worked so well that we ran around seven different stouts and every time we did it, they became wilder.
“We did a doughnut stout, a cherry chocolate stout, and Ocean Drive, which was a cherry cola ice cream float stout themed around Lana Delray.
“We’d done great things with fruits and lagers etc., but that was the first time we really pushed creativity in stout to get that really big flavour without the alcohol.
“If we hadn’t gone through the period of releasing loads of stouts in summer, which made no business sense, then we’d never have got to the point where we felt comfortable doing that kind of stuff.
“It’s all about following business sense and what strategically makes sense by looking at industry trends. If you trust people, they’ll make the right decisions and that’s what happens [at Mash Gang].”
However, the brand does not “preach sobriety”, Baggs insists: “We’re not telling people how to drink. Everyone can drink as much or as little as they want, we’re inclusive and welcoming to everyone.”
Growing up on the south coast, Baggs, who describes himself as a “strategist”, now lives in Scotland with his partner and two young children.
Balancing family life alongside being neurodivergent, the co-founder further stresses the importance of being inclusive and supportive amid the “chaos”.
He says: “We have been set up to be an incredibly inclusive company [and operate entirely remotely], like the way we approach non-alcoholic beer and spirits.
“We know not to book meetings at 3pm, for example, because people might have to go pick up their kids. It’s really easy to be inclusive. You will attract people you wouldn’t have attracted otherwise just by being kind.”
