How drinking a craft beer can help the Boise State collective

Boise State fans soon will be able to indirectly help the name, image and likeness collective that supports the school’s athletes by drinking beer – specifically, The Horseshoe Golden Ale.

Last Wednesday, the Western Collective brewery started the brewing process for The Horseshoe Golden Ale, which is a co-branded beer that’s marketed in conjunction with The Horseshoe Collective. The former is based in Garden City, Idaho; the latter is the collective that creates NIL opportunities for Boise State athletes.

It’s just a coincidence that the brewery’s name includes the word “collective,” but it’s not the first time Boise State or its supporters have thought creatively for an NIL-related campaign or programming. The athletic department received the award for Best Institutional Program at the inaugural NIL Summit last summer.

“This goes back decades, right?” The Horseshoe Collective executive director Joe Nickell, a former Boise State associate athletic director, said in a phone interview. “And obviously Boise State has come a long way since launching a blue turf in 1986. Where Boise State is currently, you’ve got a fan base that expects you to compete (with the) Power 5 day in, day out. A Power 5 mentality with Group of 5 resources, and I think what that’s done over the years is force innovation. You know, ‘How can we compete? What can we do with the resources that we have to compete at that level that we’re expected to compete at?’”

For every pint sold, Western Collective will donate 10 cents to The Horseshoe Collective. There are 24 pints in a case and Western Collective founder Cary Prewitt said the brewery hopes to sell 10,000 cases in the first year.

You do the math: That’s $24,000 based on the projections for the first year.

The brewery’s plan is for The Horseshoe Golden Ale to be a full-time fixture on its menu, rather than brewing it as a limited release. Prewitt said last week the brewery was finalizing the design of the label, and there have been discussions with the grocery store chain Albertsons – which is based in Boise – regarding potential distribution.

“As long as nothing goes wrong, it should be in football and basketball stadiums next year and available all the time,” Prewitt told On3.

Western Collective will release the beer on Saturday, April 29. Prewitt said the brewery hopes to host Boise State administrators, bands, DJs and food trucks for the occasion.

‘It really comes down to the people’

Prewitt and his family have firsthand experience with major college athletics. He attended Texas – a time that included Kevin Durant’s lone season in Austin – and his wife went to USC. His mother-in-law, Cheryl Levick, served as athletic director at Georgia State, Saint Louis and Santa Clara.

“It really comes down to the people,” Prewitt said. “You know, the last couple years, we watched the changeover to (athletic director) Jeramiah (Dickey) being in charge and watching the changeover to (football coach) Andy (Avalos) and the energy that this community, like the whole crew, was bringing. … We would not have donated money and gotten involved in Boise State athletics if we did not feel there was momentum building.”

Prewitt said Idaho has stricter alcohol laws than many states and that Anheuser-Busch has an agreement with Boise State through Learfield to provide the official beer of the Broncos.

There’s no state legislation governing NIL activities in Idaho, and co-branding a beer with The Horseshoe Collective was a way for the brewery to support Boise State athletics and athletes on a larger scale.

“It was like, ‘Hey, how do you find a concerted way to make this happen to where we can get involved and actually help build the community?’” Prewitt said. “The question for us is how do we take this thing that we do for a living and that we’re passionate about and make sure that we can still be involved in moving Boise State athletics forward.”

Nickell said Prewitt and Western Collective employees planned and presented the specifics of the beer. “When they came back to me, it was ‘Let’s do a 4.5 percent golden ale. Something that’s sessionable, something that you can have one or two of while watching a sporting event and be safe and responsible and all those things,’” Nickell said.

‘Fundraising is going to be a key piece of any collective’s operation’

In addition to the financial contributions from Western Collective, Nickell described potential benefits related to marketing and brand awareness. The ultimate goal, he said, is that a Boise State fan is able to have access to the beer regardless of where they are, whether they’re watching a game inside Albertsons Stadium or at home.

“Being able to walk into the grocery store and see The Horseshoe Collective’s logo on a can and have people turn the can around and go ‘What is this?’ and it’s got our mission statement on it,” Nickell said, describing the potential marketing benefits.

As collectives pursue sustainable business models built around recurring revenue and maximizing new revenue streams, co-branded consumables and products are a relatively untapped avenue worth exploring.

This spring, numerous collectives have partnered with the live event and mobile engagement company CUE, which provides websites where donors can get involved in “pledge-per” campaigns; in short, fans can commit to donating a specified amount every time an event occurs, such as an NCAA tournament win in basketball or home run in softball. Collectives supporting the finalists and semifinalists in the College Basketball Invitational each received contributions because of the team’s on-court success.

While pay-for-play agreements aren’t allowed under the NCAA’s interim NIL policy or some state laws, collectives can fundraise off individual or team success through the platform CUE offers.

“Fundraising is going to be a key piece of any collective’s operation. When you’re talking about long-term sustainability and those types of things, I think getting active and getting buy-in from businesses, organizations in Boise, the Treasure Valley area, that can creatively come up with concepts in spaces that they already exist really help move things along as a group,” Nickell said.

In this era of college athletics, there’s widespread pressure for creativity, especially for stakeholders of aspirational athletic departments or programs.

“I think we can get to that top-tier level because we’ve got people committed to doing it,” Prewitt said. “The more I look at the Boise State story, the more I realize how much scrappiness has been involved and how many ‘A’ players it’s taken to get there. … I don’t think you can (overstate) the value, especially when you learn that in the Mountain West, we’re bottom third for budgets that we get from the state. We’re not a well-funded athletic department from natural resources here, but the fact that they do the work and over-perform and make Boise State athletics such a big deal is really incredible.”