Downtown Los Angeles or DTLA for those with scant time call it, will be the home of a Torrance sized amount of breweries by 2016. Angel City is the old hand now what with Mumford now open and brewing, Ohana to the South and the much anticipated (at least by me) Arts District Brewing coming soon.
Recently though, the interwebs have taken a shine to knocking another future DTLA brewery down a peg. Iron Triangle and their dubious claims and spelling have garnered the negative attention that only a Trump could love.
Now I avoid Beer Advocate forums like the plague but they are a canary in the coal mine of beer snob opinion. And as such, one should strive to be in their good graces. Sorta akin to being nice to the school bully in the hope of future consideration. If you are the subject of a thread that ultimately gets pulled down, then you should start some damage control.
But the Iron Triangle seems to have also offended Instgram beer geeks as well as The Full Pint blog crew (disclosure – I follow their blog and know them). Maybe the PR team for IT is the same as the one for Tom Brady and his deflated footballs but they have got to understand that brewing beer is only part of being a winning brewery.
I will repeat what I posted on Facebook: If you don’t do community well or business savvy well then you are going to have to brew the third coming of Pliny the Younger because you will have to surmount ill will to get the beer geeks in the door. And to steal from the movie business, beer geeks are the teenage male of the four quadrants of moviegoers. You do not want to be the Fantastic Four of breweries
I will freely admit that all of my knowledge, as it were, is secondhand. But like that canary, if I am hearing about it then you know it is in the air. The proof will come served in pint glasses and I hope the beers of Iron Triangle are great and that the owners can learn from their mis-steps but maybe, long term, a failure might be more instructive for a still growing beer culture in Los Angeles.