Sethu Kalavakur and Philip Vaughn dreamed of doing something they were passionate about.
Having both worked together at Microsoft for more than 10 years, Kalavakur and Vaughn knew their next venture would be in the tech industry, but they couldn’t put their finger on exactly what they wanted to do.
Often they’d meet over beers and talk about ideas.
Then it hit them: beer.
“After about six months of talking we realized every time we were meeting we’d have these debates over beers,” Kalavakur said. “It kind of originated there and grew.”
A little over a year ago, Kalavakur and Vaughn founded Tavour.com, a website that helps educate beer fans and connect them with hard-to-find beers from around the country. The website sends out daily emails with new beers that customers can order and have shipped to their home for a flat rate.
“Once you realize that you’ve been lied to all your life about beer and there’s this whole new world of craft beer you want to try more,” Kalavakur said. “Unfortunately there’s a lot of beers from all over the country that people don’t get to try. There’s a distribution problem. We wanted to address that.”
Kalavakur and Vaughn see Tavour as serving two distinct purposes for beer fans: education and connection. They want to help the customer who wanders into the beer section of a local bottleshop and feels overwhelmed with the choices.
“People walk into a store or bottleshop and they don’t know what to pick,” Kalavakur said. “They don’t want to pick it out based solely on a label.”
So to help educate their customers, Kalavakur, Vaughn and another partner, Miranda Morton, do a lot of research. That may sound fun — buy beer, drink beer, repeat — but it’s more than just tasting. The three take turns traveling the country visiting breweries and talking to brewers about their beers. They then choose beers to highlight based on those discussions (and taste tests) and offer them to Tavour customers, writing about them in detail in the daily emails they send out.
“A lot of craft beers have a story to tell,” Kalavakur said. “Interesting ingredients or processes, there are all these choices breweries make when they make beer. We write about those. We write about the beer itself.”
That diversity of selection — Kalavakur estimates they’ve only offered the same beer twice a couple of times — appeals to customers who want to go beyond the same beers they see on the shelves at grocery stores and bottleshops.
Kalavakur talked about a recent visit he took to the Carolinas, which is one of the fastest growing craft beer regions in the U.S. There he visited Lone Rider Beers, met the brewers, talked about the beers and picked out a few styles for Tavour customers. Those are beers that most Puget Sound beer drinkers would never get to try outside of hopping a jet to Charlotte.
In a recent sample box, there were just two beers out of nine that would be recognizable to a seasoned Northwest beer fan. A number of the breweries in the sample box, including Cismontane Brewing (Rancho Santa Margarita, California), Funkwerks (Fort Collins, Colorado) and Snake River Brewing (Jackson Hole, Wyoming), aren’t available in Puget Sound bottleshops.
Kalavakur said two recent offerings show the power of Tavour. A pair of beers not available in the Seattle market — Mother Earth Brewing’s IPA and Funkwerk’s Tropic King, an imperial saison — sold out in a little under an hour.
“People love the fact they can get access to beers they can’t get on the shelves here,” Kalavakur said.
Bringing in that diversity can be difficult at times. State liquor laws and distribution agreements can block Tavour from bringing in certain brewery’s beers, but overall Kalavakur said they’ve found success with most of the breweries they’ve tried to deal with and have been competitive in their pricing.
Besides learning about new beers, Kalavakur said people are attracted to the convenience of a site like Tavour (see box).
“People love the simple approach of replying to an email,” said Kalavakur. “That’s what we want to do: Price the beer really well, get customers the info and if it appeals to them, let them order it.”
Aaron Swaney: 425-339-3430; aswaney@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @swaney_aaron79. Follow the Hops and Sips blog at www.heraldnet.com/hopsandsips.
How Tavour works
After signing up for the service on tavour.com, customers receive daily emails — one beer per day — focused on hand-selected, unique beers from breweries around the country.
The email is full of information on the beer, including details about the ingredients, description of the brewery and beer stats. If the customers wants to order the beer, they respond to the email with how many bottles they want.
That order goes on the customer’s account and, after a month, a shipment containing all of the beers ordered within the past 30 days is sent to the customer’s home or office for a rate of $14.90 (no matter the number of bottles). Customers can also pick up their order at Tavour’s distribution headquarters at 1729 1st Ave. S, Seattle.
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