In your beer interwebs travels, you may have stumbled upon a website named The Beer Necessities. It looks slick. There are some listicles. A post about cellaring. Heck it even mentions one of my favorite bands of all time, Radiohead.
But lurking at the bottom is this….
Why is SABInBev blogging? That is the question to ask. And why are they doing it in suck a “golly gee Pollyanna positive” way? To get all Shakespeare, they are bringing Birnam Wood to Dunsinane.
Hidden in the list of best canned beers for camping is a Breckenridge lager. Who owns that? Why the High End does. And lo and behold, another post is a puff piece on the advertorial show hosted by Meg Gill of Golden Road. Who owns that? You get one guess.
Why the “High” End can’t just create a website touting it’s brands is beyond me except for the fact that they want to still be considered “craft”. They need to have that association for some economic reason. It is the same reason that they have owners of the sold brewery band together to tell their story to the media. It is why they try to horn into an L.A. craft brewers festival and when that doesn’t work, throw their muscle around to block it completely.
In the end, a website that appears to be hiding their motives is a site that is hard to trust. A site that nakedly espouses their views is preferable to me because I don’t have to read between the lines or be wary of content. We are bombarded with fake news and alternative facts so be aware of what you are reading.
Epilogue: A day or two after writing this mini-rant, Beachwood Brewing let it be known that unknowingly a piece about them was on this “High End” blog. They did not take kindly to it and asked for it to be taken down which it was. When I checked back in on the blog, it seemed to have a greater percentage of posts about Elysian, 10 Barrel and others of their ilk. Hmmm.