What a So THIS Happened episode with Walnut River Brewing taught me about finding a brand's voice: stop asking, and start listening.
Rachel and I packed up the mics and took a little road trip to El Dorado to record So This Happened Podcast from the Walnut River taproom, with BJ Hunt. Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, I asked him why they chose El Dorado for the taproom's location. He told us his business partner Rick had laid out 35 water quality reports before deciding.
Thirty-five. Water reports.
He said it the way you'd mention it might rain Thursday. Then he moved right along to limestone.
I was still stuck on the reports. I sat there, mic in front of me, mentally nerding out hard and thinking well, there's the brand.
That one throwaway line has since become a voice pillar, a social post and the backbone of a blog post. None of it came out of a branding workshop. It came out of a podcast episode where three people were mostly just talking about beer.
So let me walk you through what I did with it, because you can do the same thing with your clients (or your own brand) without ever launching a podcast.
Nobody can describe their own voice
Ask a business owner to describe their brand voice and you'll hear some version of "friendly, approachable, fun." I've heard it in agency kickoffs, boardrooms and coffee shop meetings for more than a decade. Apparently every brand on earth is friendly, approachable and fun.
It isn't anyone's fault. Describing your own voice is like describing how you sound on voicemail. You can't really hear it. Everyone else can.
But people talk in their voice all day long. So I've mostly stopped asking. I listen instead.
(Quick disclosure: Walnut River is a Backspace Media client. BJ welcomed Rachel Chappelle and me into the taproom because the brewery's story is a great Kansas story. The voice guide came after, and it was highly inspired by that episode.)
What I pulled for the voice guide
When I went back through the transcript, BJ's voice was sitting right there on the page. Four things gave it away.
The phrases he repeats. BJ said "True story" four times. When he described trying an early test batch of a cotton candy sour, his verdict was "Ooh, this doesn't suck." Both became signature phrases in the guide, with rules for when they get used.
How he handles a win. BJ warms up to good news with "not to toot our horn," and then he hands it off. When he told us Walnut River had grown into the second-largest brewery in the state, he followed it with "it's really tooting Rick's horn. Rick doesn't toot his horn very well." That became our first pillar: proud, minus the hype.
Where the punchline lands. BJ always saves the best part for last. Before Walnut River was Walnut River, Rick had already named it Heartland Brewing Company. BJ asked whether he'd checked the name. He hadn't. There was already a Heartland Brewery in New York, so BJ called the owner to ask nicely. The answer was "I appreciate you calling. No." They'd already bought about $700 worth of pilsner glasses and shirts, so BJ mailed him a shirt and a glass. "Thanks, man." That's the rhythm, so the guide calls for one joke per post, saved for last.
Numbers where most people use adjectives. He never once said "crafted with passion." He said 35 water reports, 930-gallon batches and a first bar top that was a $50 bench off Craigslist. Specifics became a pillar too.
Then I did the step most brand guides skip. I argued with my own draft. Every rule got a devil's advocate.
Does "doesn't suck" undersell the beer on a store shelf? Yes. It lives in the taproom now.
Is the scrappy underdog story still true for the second-largest brewery in the state? Not anymore, so we tell it in the past tense.
That's the whole test, honestly. A good voice guide should feel like catching your reflection in a shop window. A little surprising, and completely familiar.
The content calendar I didn't plan for
I went into that transcript looking for a voice and some social media clips. I came out with a content calendar too.
Podcast guests tell stories the way people tell them at the bar, with all the good details left in. And every one of those stories is a blog post that's already halfway written. Here's where I found them.
The "why" stories. Why El Dorado? According to BJ, "It is simply the water." The Flint Hills limestone around El Dorado Lake does so much of the work that the brewery only needs a big carbon filter, where Wichita water would need a full reverse osmosis setup. Add a friendly annual rivalry with Emporia over who has the best water, plus the fact that the Walnut River is what fills El Dorado Lake, and that's a post that practically writes itself.
The stories about the building. Before Walnut River opened in 2013, the taproom was Rick's living room. Then part of it became a flea market run by Rick's wife and mother-in-law, while the brewery squeezed into the skinny 700-square-foot strip that's now the canning line. And that $50 Craigslist bench? It's still sitting in the taproom. That's a whole building-history series.
The people he names. Every time BJ credited Rick or Travis (a microbiologist, it turns out), I wrote it down. That's a "Meet the Brewers" series the blog didn't have yet.
The stories that are just fun. The brewery trip to Denver where three guys each ordered a flight and ended up with 78 taster glasses on the table. The kegs of water labeled "high quality H2O" that went on Boy Scout camping trips. Those aren't blog posts. They're perfect social posts.
The topics he can't stop talking about. When a guest spends five minutes on one subject, your audience probably has questions about it.
Add it all up and one recording gave us a brand voice guide, a blog pipeline, dozens of sound bites for Reels and a shot list for our next content day.
Not bad for one episode.
Try it yourself (no podcast required)
All you really need is a recorder, a good conversation and the willingness to play host instead of interviewer.
Treat them like a guest. Ask for stories and skip the adjectives. "How did you pick this location?" will get you further than "How would you describe your brand?" every single time.
Record and transcribe. I edit in Descript, so the transcript shows up with the edit. Any transcription tool will do.
Read the transcript twice. The first pass is for how they talk. That's your voice. The second pass is for what they talk about. That's your content.
Grab the numbers and the names. Specifics are what make a brand sound like a real business with real people behind it.
Argue with your draft. Give every rule a devil's advocate before the client ever sees it.
Get the owner's sign-off. In my experience, people are a little surprised and a little flattered to see their own voice written down.
The best interview didn't feel like one
The best brand interview I've ever done didn't feel like an interview at all. It felt like three people in a taproom talking about beer, Kansas, and a very large stack of water reports.
And it got me thinking about how much brand voice we leave on the table (sometimes literally) because we're busy asking the wrong questions.
So I'll ask you a better one: what's a phrase your business says all the time that's never been written down?
Tell me in the comments. I'm now collecting them.
