College sports put a twist on team spirit, with signature brews at games and grocers

MILWAUKEE -- Missy Vraney and Kristin Westphal didn't go to Marquette. Neither did any of their relatives. Yet their family tradition of attending Golden Eagles basketball games spans generations.

“Whenever our uncle couldn’t go, our dad would take one of us and just kind of alternate,” Vraney recalls.

They’re still supporting the school regularly — just in beer money rather than tuition fees. It happens every time they buy a Marquette Golden Ale before heading to the Fiserv Forum stands.

This marks the first season since Marquette entered a partnership with Milwaukee-based Third Space Brewing to sell Marquette Golden Ale — the school’s officially licensed and co-branded craft beer — at Golden Eagles sporting events as well as in Third Space outlets and area groceries. As part of the deal, 15% of the revenues go back to Marquette.

“People are extremely excited about it,” said Andy Gehl, the co-founder and president of Third Space Brewing. “People love drinking beer with their favorite school, their favorite sports team’s logo on it. That’s No. 1. Also, they want to support businesses that support their university, and vice versa.”

This has become the latest fund-raising trend for college athletics.

Learfield, which manages sports sponsorships for over 160 universities and licensing agreements for nearly 800 colleges, says that 93 of its schools had licensing deals for alcoholic beverages for the first six months of the current fiscal year. That’s a 57.6% rise from fiscal year 2023, when 59 schools had deals for their own signature alcoholic beverage.

The number of Learfield schools with licensing deals specifically with craft beers has more than doubled in that time – from 16 in 2023 to 36 this year.

Cory Moss, Learfield’s president of brand management and marketing, acknowledges he would have been surprised by this kind of growth four or five years ago. Then he started noticing more interest from the schools themselves and from various local craft breweries wanting to establish partnerships.

“When schools got really behind it and the craft industry really started to take it seriously, that’s when it really started to grow,” Moss said. “And that growth hasn’t been surprising.”

It represents a major change in the college sports landscape, considering how many schools weren’t even selling alcoholic beverages at their athletic events not so long ago. The Southeastern Conference didn’t permit the sales of beer and wine at sporting events until 2019.

That policy change spurred Tennessee and other SEC programs to start getting local breweries to launch signature beers that could be sold at their games as well as in stores or tap rooms off campus. Tennessee partnered with Knoxville-based Yee-Haw Brewing Company last summer to make Vol Lager the exclusive craft beer of the Tennessee Volunteers.

“I think for the distributors and even the companies to get a return on their investment in terms of the sponsorship, being able to sell it within the venues is a big deal because when our fans can see it — 100,000 people walking into Neyland Stadium — they might grow fan affinity to buy it at the grocery store also,” said Alicia Longworth, Tennessee’s deputy athletics director/chief marketing officer. “With the timing, it was good for the business and it was good for us.”

Longworth said Tennessee sold 16 different types of beer throughout Neyland Stadium last fall and Vol Lager always ranked in the top four.

Gehl said over 3,000 “case equivalents” (including cases of the canned beer or the equivalent of a case in draft beer) of Third Space Brewing were sold in the first three months since its partnership with Marquette began. Third Space is now selling sweatshirts with both the Third Space and Marquette logos as well as glasses that resemble the Marquette Golden Ale can.

Other schools have enjoyed similar success with their signature beers. Learfield said college-licensed alcoholic beverages had $7.5 million in total sales during the 2024 fiscal year.

Some universities with signature beers have proceeds go directly to the schools. Others have it go through collectives. For instance, Cincy Reigns — a collective benefiting Cincinnati athletics, established a partnership with Cincinnati brewery Rhinegeist to sell Cincy Light at Bearcats games and around the area.

“Some of the early feedback I received was there were bars and restaurants that said fans were showing up in gear just to drink Cincy Light at the bar,” said Brian Fox, who chairs the Cincy Reigns board of directors. “I think there was a TGI Friday's in one of the suburban areas, that said people were showing up — they weren’t getting a table for dinner, they just knew they had Cincy Light on tap, so they showed up in fan gear, University of Cincinnati athletics gear just to try Cincy Light.”

Moss noted that these type of partnerships require plenty of input from both the school and the brewery, noting that you can’t make a successful product just by slapping a school logo on a beer can.

These schools generally try to find breweries with local ties. Yee-Haw, the company that partnered with Tennessee, was founded by Tennessee law school graduate Joe Baker. Third Space, which makes Marquette Golden Ale, has its brewery less than 1 ½ miles from Marquette’s campus.

But the most important factor in the success of these beers is obvious.

Joe Dobrogowski of Germantown, Wisconsin, made that point clear as he enjoyed a Marquette Golden Ale before a recent game.

“If it didn’t taste good, I wouldn’t force myself to drink,” the Marquette season-ticket holder said. “That’s first and foremost. I think it’s just a bonus that some of it goes back to the school.”

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AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports