TheChive brews clicks -- and beer

AUSTIN — For theChive, funny videos and pictures of scantily-clad women now generate more than 250 million website visits each month — and attract more unique visitors than established content destinations such as Salon and The Daily Beast.

That success has brewed new areas of expansion for the entertainment site and its parent company, including live events, charities and product sales — including its own beer.

The company's Resignation Brewery has just begun national distribution of its second beer, KCCO Gold, a crisp, slightly sweet straw-colored lager. Its first beer, KCCO Black Lager, released in September 2013, will go into hibernation and become a fall seasonal release.

If India pale ales are all the rage, why do lagers click with theChive's beer barons? "Don't get me wrong, I love ales, but you have a lot more ability to cover things up with added spices or hopping the heck out of the beer," said Joe Michaels, Resignation Brewery's president. "With the lager you do it right or you don't. We knew they were a little more difficult and we wanted to come out and show that we were for real."

TheChive's brewing enterprise fermented organically, along with the site's growth. In 2008, brothers Leo and John Resig founded theChive as a photo entertainment website. The name comes from the combination of Leo's previous home of Chicago and John's home of Venice Beach, Calif.

Traffic has mushroomed to about 14 million unique visitors monthly, up 252% from 2014, according to comScore. That makes it the second-biggest entertainment humor site, behind CollegeHumor.com.

Their original Venice Beach office became a destination for visitors as theChive's reputation grew as a lifestyle site — from the beginning it encouraged meetups in real-life.

So when fans dropped by the office, theChive employees would share bottles of the home-brewed black lager they had made. Both of the Resigs were home brewers, as were several other employees. When visitors and partygoers posted pictures of the beer, others wanted a taste.

"We had a huge beer fridge," Michaels said. "We shared those and started getting some great feedback and thought, why not? ... Why not share it with everybody else?"

So, the Resigs and Michaels fine-tuned their black lager recipe and, to ramp up national distribution instantly, they approached the Craft Brew Alliance, a consortium of several breweries including Redhook Ale Brewing and Widmer Brothers Brewing. Anheuser-Busch has a minority stake in the alliance and serves as a distributor.

Sales of the beer rose so quickly that Resignation Brewery became the 86th largest brewery in the U.S. in 2014, out of more than 3,200. "With the (KCCO) Gold out, we expect to do twice as well," Michaels said.

Resignation Brewery — the name comes from parent company Resignation Media — is a socially networked brewery, as its beer became a staple at the growing number of Chive gatherings across the U.S. With about 2 million members of the Chive Nation on social networks and 200 local Chive chapters, there's typically a dozen or more unofficial meetups each weekend, says Chive Nation Director Dave Welch.

He and the brewery's marketing manager, Pat Killoren, help organize official events that number in the hundreds of attendees — they always ship in cases of KCCO beer. The parties often raise money for charities, too; combined with Chive Charities, the firm's official charitable wing, more than $4 million has been raised.

At theChive's headquarters here, which the company spent $4 million remodeling before moving in about two years ago, the beer is available in bottles and on tap. There's a walk-in freezer to keep chilled bottles, kegs and ingredients for continued home brewing experiments.

Just as theChive is growing, so is its beer lineup. A white wheat beer becomes available this month in Texas only and next year an amber ale is scheduled for national release. Testing has begun on an India pale ale, too.

But fans of the KCCO black lager can chill until the cooler weather hits. "As much as we love it," MIchaels said, "you don't want to sit in a 100-degree day in Texas drinking darker beers like that."

Follow Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider