To explain, this post was brought on after watching The Lego Movie. I know that sounds like an odd point of departure but a movie based on a toy that has been product extended in ever larger amounts was charming and brought up points about creativity versus control and the sheer joy of randomly building something out of multi-colored bricks or simply following the instructions to re-create a Millennium Falcon. Which (Obviously) lead me to….
…branding. As craft beer careens to ever larger heights (now at a 126 year high over 2,500), standing out becomes very difficult. And that standing out includes more than one aspect. It is not only the styles of beer that you brew, it is the style and vibe of your tasting room, it is your tap handles, your Twitter account, the merch you sell and your logo, but it is also way deeper as well in two ways that I think are overlooked and more important than a snazzy label.
Do you have a house yeast or a hop (or hop blend) that you lean on heavily? That, to me, is branding. Does your brewer or owner pour at festivals, or is it a rep or non-brewing employee? Not that either is bad, but it is part of the brand.
To drill down further. Are your beers of a recognizable whole and are you involved on a physical level with the customer.
A writer has a style. You can easily tell Stephen King from Neil Gaiman even though both traffic in overlapping realms. Is the brand of your brewery recognizable from the beer and the beer alone? Now I am not saying that a random person plucked from the street will recognize the specific beer each and every time. Hell, I am horrible at blind tastings. What is more important is that beer geeks should be able to identify your beer after a few tasters. Much like one could pick out a Radiohead song after a few bars or more. Give me (5) beers from Eagle Rock Brewery and I should be pretty sure after two or three. Do I admire the craftsmanship and artistry of their labels. Sure do. You will often catch me rotating the bottle to get a better look at it. But the beers inside the bottle should be as identifiable as the art work on the outside. Because in the short term, someone may pluck your beer from a cooler due to an angry unicorn on the label but they will get it repeatedly if the beer is good and they will become fans and brand ambassadors if they find they like the brewery in-toto.
Which does not, by the way, mean you can’t roam far afield in your recipes. It means your range of beers should be what the warm and fuzzy crowd call, a part of who you are. A German style tilted brewery can brew an IPA but from the mindset of what they have done previously. A customer that can say that a certain outlier of a beer tastes nothing like what else you brew, knows what else you brew. It only reinforces the brand.
And that leads me to the other prong of my argument. The other part that I think reinforces the brand more than having a rock’n’roll artist design your labels or changing the name of a beer. That other prong is the “actual” interaction with people.
Now, I am an introvert. I much prefer the e-mail to talking. But it is integral for a brewer and brewery to be “there” with people. They have to be extroverts even with introverts like me. And as much as people hail the social media, it isn’t always a conversation. More often it is talking only. Like a jukebox that is always on that people will occasionally notice when a particular song comes on. Nothing against it but I would not be surprised if Facebook or Twitter or Instagram is considered “Old” in the near future. With some “New” taking it’s spot as what you “Have” to do to be relevant. You need only see Questlove faux angry at Jimmy Fallon over incessant #hashtagging to glimpse what is coming.
Again, short term interacting via interweb is important but where the rubber meets the road is when the brewer talks to a person consuming the beer. That will stick with people. To again use Eagle Rock as an example. A newsletter in my inbox is cool but opening the orange door to their taproom and talking to them in the brewery is so much cooler. You see the whole person and their enthusiasm for the beer that just cannot be embedded as a link or commented on.
Why else would some festivals place such a high importance on the brewer manning the booth? Some go as far as to require it for a specified amount a time. Why? Because people at said festivals wanted to see the people who made the beer or conceived of the beer or who are the guiding spirit behind the beer and not a gamely trying volunteer or sales manager. Just to re-iterate, nothing against either but those people are there for the outside of the bottle stuff.
To drive the point into the ground, the person is akin to the beer in the bottle and the social media is the kin of the label on the outside.
(Peel the Label is a new series of posts that talk about craft beer from a different angle without photos, links or graphics just the bare bottle, as it were)