Produced by Devin Southard @ Yahoo Finance: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/breaking-bad-star-dean-norris-makes-fictional-beer-schraderbrau-a-reality-140120950.html
A growing streaming tv industry has created a market for giving fans what they want: turning fiction into reality.
Breaking bad actor Dean Norris joined Yahoo Finance’s The Final Round to discuss Schraderbräu, the mythological homebrew from Norris’ beloved character Hank Schrader.
“I went to Sony, struck a deal with them for the licensing. I found a great partner from a USC business school guy who also worked in the beer business…and we timed it because we knew we had some things coming out, like a little thing in a month.”
The actor is hinting at the highly anticipated Breaking Bad film coming to Netflix (NFLX), which released a trailer earlier this month.
Norris is not the first to see the possibilities in capitalizing on a fanbase. In October of 2017 and February of 2018, McDonald’s (MCD) brought back a limited amount of its Szechuan sauce after the Disney’s Mulan-inspired dip was referenced in an episode of Adult Swim’s “Rick and Morty”. More recently, Coca-Cola (KO) brought back New Coke in honor of the latest season of the Netflix series “Stranger Things”. Norris is looking to do something that’s more than temporary with his product.
“We really were concerned that it wasn’t just going to be a novelty beer. We knew we could bring a lot of people to the beer with the name, so we wanted to make sure it was a quality beer….We partnered with this brewery in Buellton, California that’s rather famous for making German style lagers. They had the capacity that they could do our beers well.”
The beer is available to purchase in a limited number of Cotsco’s (COST), and online, and soon to be in Canada.
Devin Southard is a producer at Yahoo Finance.