Author's Table
A wide range of creative campaigns, fast-turn ideas, and high-visibility collaborations that became some of the brewery’s most memorable stories.
Brooke Will NOT BE Broke
A collaboration with Shelter Manatee put real adoptable dogs on beer cans, earned worldwide media attention, and helped reunite one featured dog with its original owner years after going missing.
Adoptable Lager began as a local awareness campaign with a simple, highly visible idea: use beer cans to spotlight real dogs available for adoption. While serving as Sales & Marketing Director at Motorworks Brewing, I led the campaign strategy, marketing, public relations, and rollout in partnership with Shelter Manatee. The project quickly moved far beyond its original local audience, earning coverage from CNN, NBC, ABC, BBC, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and hundreds of other outlets. The campaign became an ongoing distributed beer series, with new adoptable shelter dogs featured quarterly on cans. It also went viral twice. After the initial wave of national and international press, one of the dogs featured on the can was recognized by her original owner in Minnesota, years after going missing during a family trip to Bradenton, Florida. Once ownership was verified, the reunion sparked a second wave of media coverage, including a feature on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt. The campaign remains one of the clearest examples of how a simple creative idea, grounded in a real community cause, can reach far beyond its original audience.
Pairing With Pros
A 24-hour creative sprint turned Gronk’s arrival in Tampa Bay into one of Motorworks Brewing’s fastest, loudest, and most successful product launches.
When Rob Gronkowski signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, we saw an opportunity to connect an already-scheduled beer release to the excitement building across the Tampa Bay area. Within 24 hours, our team had renamed the beer, developed a fully designed label, ordered the labels, built the launch plan, and sent out a press release. The speed of the project helped generate TV appearances, articles, and broader media coverage, turning a quick creative pivot into a highly visible local release. Within two weeks, Gronkzilla was in distribution at more than 100 accounts, with placements secured through football season at many locations. The most surreal moment came during a nationally televised Bucs vs. Giants game, when a broadcast splash screen introduced Gronk as “Gronkzilla,” a nickname that had not been part of his public identity before our product launch. The beer became a fast, fun homage to Tampa Bay sports culture and the energy around Gronk joining the team.
Tales of Waffles
The Corgi
Turning an El Camino into a working koelschip? Strange idea, perhaps. Certainly one that made people stop, laugh, and immediately want to know more.
After months of joking internally about whether Jose’s El Camino could actually become a functional koelschip, the idea became real when we found a heat-resistant, food-grade liner that made the project possible. Once the El Camino bed was properly lined, the team gathered on the coldest day in early 2018 to brew the beer together, then camped out in the beer garden overnight to make sure nothing unwanted made its way into the beer while it naturally inoculated. The next morning, we pushed the El Camino back inside and sent the beer off for a long fermentation, with time spent in both oak and stainless steel. After several months, Fermentis Camino was packaged in 500mL green bottles and released with a story that was every bit as strange as the beer itself. I led the marketing and public relations around the project, helping turn a collaborative in-house experiment into a story picked up by national and regional press.