Homebrew: Bringing it Home
Homebrew was Sour Bicycles’ project to bring frame production home to Dresden. Until then, Sour’s steel frames had been produced by experienced manufacturing partners in Taiwan, but the disruption of the pandemic exposed the limitations of relying on a supply chain halfway around the world. Homebrew meant building the knowledge, tooling, processes, and physical production capacity to manufacture Sour frames in-house in Saxony—starting with mountain bikes and eventually expanding across the range. It was a huge undertaking for a small company, but one that gave Sour greater control over production, shorter and more predictable supply chains, and a much closer connection between the people designing the bikes and the people making them.
A Growing Identity
My role was to help turn Homebrew from an internal manufacturing project into a story people could understand and get excited about. Working at Sour, I handled the PR, marketing, and visual communication surrounding the project, coordinating photographers, journalists, and our in-house filmmaker to document the process and build interest as production came online. That meant finding ways to explain not only what Sour was doing, but why moving production to Dresden mattered. Through press coverage, photography, video, social media, and ongoing production updates, I helped introduce Homebrew to a wider audience and establish locally made-in-Saxony frames as an important part of Sour’s identity.
