A good storyteller makes you give a crap about a subject you otherwise have no interest in. Director Christo Brock’s Brewmance made me give a crap about craft beer, home brewing, and the drive for brewers to realize their dreams of “making it” in business.
As the cute title sort of suggests, this is a realm of mostly Bros. Guys who love beer, but in a much more sophisticated way than the average dude drinking from a red Solo cup. No, these guys are at a level that amounts to a scientific approach- trial and error- getting just the right percentages of just the right ingredients to make something, they hope, that is uniquely their own.
But a movie about beer wouldn’t be so interesting. A movie about people to whom it means the world is what a documentary requires, and here Brock has found a gallery of different personalities to follow: There’s the guy who played a million gigs with Reel Big Fish, but left his life on the road to recruit a childhood friend to start The Liberation Brewing Company. There’s the Christian father and son duo who find a way to bring people together through the suds and we watch them build the Ten Mile Brewing Company, literally, from the ground up.
Among the “regular folks”, we see titans of the industry sprinkled in as well: you’ll probably recognize the voice, and maybe the face, of Jim Koch from his many years of Samuel Adams ads. His description of the roots of his romance with the craft barely stops short of swooning. And the guy behind Sierra Nevada has some interesting points of view from a guy at the top.
A thread of history is expertly woven within the narrative, but for me, it all came down to this: I cared about the guys (almost no women anywhere to be found) and I wanted them to succeed. A climactic sequence at the Craft Beer Awards ( I think it was called) has us on the edge of our seats, rooting for these upstarts to take the prize.
I will almost certainly never taste the beers mentioned in the story, but I feel like I have a stake in the brewers’ stories. That’s good storytelling.
Brewmance can be seen on the following Video-On-Demand platforms beginning April 13th:
US: Apple TV (iTunes), FandangoNow , Google Play, Vudu, Microsoft Store. Google Play, Altavod, Vimeo On Demand and InDemand on Comcast, Spectrum, Cox, DirecTV and major cable providers.
CANADA: Apple TV (iTunes), Google Play , Microsoft Store, Vimeo On Demand
UK: Apple TV (iTunes), Google Play, Microsoft Store, Vimeo On Demand
