Beer in the Digital Age
It’s not far-fetched to suggest that the modern, twenty-first century craft beer movement would not have reached such great heights had it not been for the Internet. The trajectory of the craft segment from the 1990s through the 2010s very closely mimics that of online world. Craft beer volume started to slow in the late ’90s, just as the tech bubble was about to burst. Then, in the mid-2000s, craft growth accelerated once again, just as this social media thing started to take over. Coincidence? Yes and no. While there’s no real correlation between the tech boom and the initial craft beer surge in the ’90s, social media certainly has played a significant role in keeping the craft conversation going, connecting beer fans with the brewers and products they love, and fostering the sort of give-and-take relationship between brand and consumer that never really existed previously. In traditional marketing and advertising, it was pretty much a one-way discussion, with the brand owners talking at drinkers and hoping for the best. (Yes, that is admittedly an oversimplification of the branding process. Please, ad agencies, don’t send any hate mail.)
Never in the history of marketing has the playing field been more level. Small brewers always have known that they’d never have access to even a small fraction of the mega brewers’ marketing budgets to commit to traditional advertising. Most of the craft producers’ eggs were in the word-of-mouth basket. Of course, back in the day, word-of-mouth meant actual syllables coming out of real human voice boxes. And it was a fairly localized phenomenon.
Now, if someone likes a beer, the rest of the world—and in this case “world” is not hyperbole—knows it in an instant.
The savvier brewers have learned to use this new dynamic to their advantage. It’s not hard to gauge how well developed a brewery’s social media program is; just look at its Twitter stats. At last count, Delaware’s Dogfish Head was closing in on 300,000 followers, besting even Sierra Nevada, a brewery four times its size with which it has frequently collaborated. Of course, it’s not just about followers. Dogfish Head has tweeted more than 40,000 times since it joined that social media platform in October 2008. Sierra, meanwhile, has tweeted about one-sixth of the number of times that Dogfish has since the Chico, California-based company signed on about six months after the Delaware brewery. Dogfish has a much greater Follower-to-Following (those it follows) ratio: Dogfish follows one account for every 120 accounts that follow it. Sierra follows one for every ten accounts that follow it.
But brewery does not live on Twitter alone. (Let’s not forget that Sierra Nevada founder Ken Grossman is a billionaire, after all.) Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Yelp, and LinkedIn each plays a unique role in building a presence in the social-sphere.
But those platforms are very far from being the only games in town available to brewers and drinkers alike. Beer-themed apps and social platforms have become an industry unto themselves in recent years.
UnTappd
The most prominent app among beer geeks has been UnTappd, launched in 2010 by tech entrepreneurs Tim Mather and Greg Avola. In a little over three years, the UnTappd app has had more than one million users. Much like Yelp or Facebook users would check in to places they’re currently visiting, members of the UnTappd nation check in to beers (as well as the places where they’re enjoying—or not enjoying—them). And, just as they would with Yelp, they can write reviews on the spot and rate the brand on a scale of one to five bottle caps. Users also can post photos of the beers and, most importantly, connect with other drinkers and brewers anywhere around the globe. It’s been an invaluable tool for brewers, as they have been able to assess the public response to a new offering. UnTappd also enables them to keep an eye on venues that serve their products. If a bar is serving an out-of-date or generally subpar pints of their beer, the brewer can alert the local distributor about that retail account; it may not be maintaining its draft lines or properly washing its glassware, or it may be generally mishandling the brands.
Pintley
If UnTappd is the Yelp of beer apps, Pintley is the Netflix—at least in the way the latter suggests movies and TV series based on your tastes and streaming history. Pintley learns drinkers’ tastes based on past ratings and tasting notes, and it suggests beers that the micro-robots are sure those users will enjoy. The app also invites those beer lovers to free local events where they can taste those suggestions for real. The app launched the same year as UnTappd and was created by Boston-based entrepreneurs Tim Noetzel and Shannon Hicks.
BeerMenus
When it comes to smartphone apps, simplicity is often the greatest virtue. This is true not just in terms of smartphone apps’ ease of use, but by the fact that they take the guesswork out of what it is exactly that a particular piece of tech actually does. And that, in a nutshell, is BeerMenus, an app that provides . . . well, beer menus. It tells you what’s on tap and in bottles at which bars and restaurants in your immediate vicinity. It also alerts the user when favorite drinking establishments add new brews to the list. Users can follow specific beers and receive notifications when those become available nearby. Let’s say you’re a big fan of The Alchemist’s Heady Topper, but you can never find it. (There isn’t a lot of it to go around.) BeerMenus will give you real-time info on where it is so you don’t have to miss it again. When New York brothers Will and Eric Stephens started the digital guide in 2008, it focused only on the city but quickly expanded nationwide. The website and app now include listings from more than 15,000 bars, restaurants, and beer shops across the United States, with updates on nearly 100,000 brews.
TapHunter
BeerMenus’s most direct competitor is TapHunter, founded in San Diego in 2010 by Jeff and Melani Gordon. It offers a bit more than what types of beers your favorite watering holes are serving at a particular moment, and it also has info on wine and spirits. It gives personalized recommendations on what and where to drink based on the user’s established preferences. And, like BeerMenus, it alerts users when their favorite drinks become available nearby. It’s also a good tool for breweries, allowing them to spread the word about their brews and connect the libations with their target drinkers as quickly as possible. It’s currently in select locations across the country but is expanding quite rapidly.
CAMRA Good Beer Guide
If you’re planning a trip to the United Kingdom, do not board the plane until you’ve downloaded the Campaign for Real Ale’s Good Beer Guide app. CAMRA still prints a fat guide annually, but the app is so much lighter and you don’t have to wait a year for it to update. The app helps users find pubs throughout the UK that serve real ale on cask—and serve it well, at the right temperature, and with the appropriate level of tender, loving care. Thousands of CAMRA volunteers compile, review, and update information on more than 4,500 pubs throughout Great Britain, drilling down to details like whether a particular venue serves food (and during which hours that food is available), how many hand pumps are on the bar, which breweries’ beers it typically carries, its hours of operation, and whether it’s accessible for people with disabilities. Like all good apps, it’s location-specific and tells you exactly how much distance separates you from a spot-on pint of bitter. (It even works in the US. It’s always fun to see that your favorite Manchester pub is exactly 3,642 miles from where you’re standing at this moment.)
The app is free to download, but that gets the usual a very rudimentary form of it. Much more functionality is available to those who pay the modest $6.99 annual subscription.
Beat the Brewmaster
Beat the Brewmaster turns the task of tasting and pairing beer into a game. Players find the beer they’re drinking on the app or website, rate it, and then get instant feedback on how their impressions jive (or don’t) with the impressions of the actual brewmaster behind that beer. The more closely their assessments align with the brewmaster’s, the more points the users gain.
“It’s all around sensory skills,” says Chris Clarke, one of the app’s creators. “To play the game, you’ve got to have a beer in front of you. It’s visual, aroma, mouthfeel, aftertaste.”
The more points users gain, the higher they climb on the leaderboard, unlocking levels Enthusiast, Pro, and Master. And they can boast about their progress by sharing their success on Facebook, Twitter, and the other usual social media suspects. It’s becoming an educational tool not just for drinkers but for brewery and distributor sales reps as well. It enables them to stay sharp and speak more authoritatively about the portfolios they’re hawking.
The Pioneers
BeerAdvocate
BeerAdvocate was beer-based social media before social media and smartphones even existed. The site was founded by another Boston-based duo, brothers Jason and Todd Alstrom (Todd has since moved to Denver), way back in 1996. The site has enabled users to register and review beers, bars, and other brew-centric destinations. The number of individual beers in the BeerAdvocate database numbers well into the six figures. The number of user-contributed reviews—the Alstrom brothers also write their own takes on the brews—is well into the seven figures, somewhere around 4 million. The BeerAdvocate brand has since expanded to include a mobile app, a print magazine, and several successful Boston beer festivals throughout the year.
Ratebeer
Four years after the Alstroms posted the first BeerAdvocate review, Ratebeer came on to the scene with its own ratings-and-reviews system for beer geeks. The site has changed hands since it was initially founded by Bill Buchanan in 2000. It’s now owned by executive director Joe Tucker, who runs the site from Sonoma County, California. It partnered on a third-party-developed mobile app, BeerBuddy Powered by RateBeer, which enables users to call up RateBeer scores, record and rate what they’ve had, and read news and discussions on user forums. The site also publishes a print compendium, The Beer Guide, based on the consensus ratings of tens of thousands of its users in its community.
Games and Other Curiosities
Beer apps don’t always have to be about education and tasting notes. Sometimes they’re just for fun. And they go beyond just the plethora of virtual beer pong apps on the highly saturated market (we’ll leave those off).
Fiz: The Brewery Management Game
“In some games, you have to rescue the princess, slay the dragon, save the world,” the little 16-bit avatar says in the trailer for Fiz. “This time, do something that really matters . . . make beer!”
To call Fiz just a game would be unfair to the innovative little mobile app. It’s actually one of the most diverting primers on the process of making beer—including the nuances among different varieties of hops and malt—as well as selling it in the marketplace. It features business intelligence from retail accounts that give the player a competitive advantage over rival breweries (information that even folks doing the real-world job would covet). Getting to the next level in this game means growing your business, and that means upgrading equipment and hiring employees (from a pool of folks who bring their own unique skill sets to the job). It really stands head-and-shoulders above the other beer-game apps out there. (Again, how many beer pong apps do we need?) It truly celebrates the beverage, rather than the state of inebriation that its overconsumption
can cause.
iBeer
If there were an award for Best Stupid Fun App, it would surely go to iBeer (it would narrowly defeat iFart because it gets a few extra points for being less low-brow). You’re not going to learn anything, you’re not going to make any friends, and you just might lose a few IQ points after playing with it for a few minutes. But it’s a fantastic ice breaker in awkward social situations. It’s nothing more than an interactive glass of virtual beer. The fizzy brew with generously foamy heat fills the smartphone screen and reacts to the user’s movements. Tilt it toward your mouth and you can pretend-drink it. It guarantees . . . uhh . . . seconds of enjoyment!
Beer Timer
Some might say that Beer Timer borders on unnecessary, but it does serve a very important purpose, if a bit on the niche side. It tells you when the beer you’ve selected is going to be at optimal drinking temperature if it’s currently at room temperature and you want to speed-chill it in the freezer. The user selects the size of the beer (12 ounces or 22/24 ounces), whether it’s in a bottle or a can, and whether it’s a pale lager, pale ale, dark lager, porter, or stout. (Yes, that selection is a little limited, but it’s easy enough to extrapolate among similar styles.) It’s little more than a novelty, to be sure, but at least it eliminates the possibility of forgetting about the beer(s) in the freezer and essentially ruining them (and potentially everything else in the freezer if it happens to explode).
New Beer Media
Digital technology is obviously about so much more than social media platforms and mobile apps (both useful and time-wasting); the Internet has revolutionized and democratized beer writing and broadcasting (admittedly a misnomer when we’re talking about ones and zeros).
Beer blogging has become such a pervasive media genre that it now has its own quasi-professional conference every year on two continents (once in the US and once at a rotating beer destination in Europe).
And the rise of podcasting and Internet radio has given an actual, audible voice to enthusiasts and pros alike, turning hobbies into full-fledged media outlets. The advent of approachably priced audio equipment and the means to connect with an audience outside of the corporately controlled airwaves has opened up golden age of beer-related content creation.
The Heritage Radio Network is one such entity that has created an online community for the foodie set, of which craft beer is a prominent component. The network is the creation of Patrick Martins, who previously made a name for himself as the founder of Slow Food USA, a nonprofit organization that advocates a fresh, seasonal, sustainable, and healthy food supply that’s available to all walks of life and promotes fair labor practices. Heritage Radio Network was built on a similar ethos. The very DIY nature of the operation is exemplified by its studio headquarters, which is inside a pair of decommissioned shipping containers—those big metal ones you see stacked up at commercial ports—in the back courtyard of trendy Bushwick, Brooklyn eatery Roberta’s. Bushwick has become the center of Brooklyn’s creative scene and neo-artisanal movement—it’s the setting of the HBO Lena Dunham series, Girls—since many of the creative people living and working there were priced out of the adjacent hipster hub, Williamsburg (not that Bushwick is that much more affordable anymore).
Heritage Radio Network
Among Heritage Radio Network’s beer-focused programming is “Beer Sessions Radio” (Tuesdays at 5:00 p.m. ET), which covers all facets of the craft beer world. Jimmy Carbone—owner of the popular East Village, Manhattan subterranean gastropub Jimmy’s No. 43—hosts the hour-long informal discussion with notable brewers, beer writers, publicans, and other personalities from the worldwide scene, always over a few beers, of course. Carbone launched the show in 2010 with his original cohost Ray Deter, proprietor of another well-regarded East Village beer bar, dba. Sadly, a little over a year after its launch, Deter was killed in a bicycle accident in Manhattan.
Guests have ranged from brewerati like Garrett Oliver—brewmaster and vice president of Brooklyn Brewery (the studio’s proximity to Oliver’s Williamsburg base definitely has helped)—to folks involved with sister beverages like cider and saké.
Heritage is also the home of “Fuhmentaboudit,” a weekly show (Mondays at 7:00 p.m. ET) hosted by writer and fermentation expert Mary Izett, author of the book Speed Brewing and founder of the blog MyLifeOnCraft.com, and professional brewer Chris Cuzme. (The power couple of the New York brewing scene also run the gypsy brewery Cuzett Libations.)
The Brewing Network
Where the Heritage Radio Network focuses on beer as a piece of the wider food world, the Brewing Network—if you can’t already tell by its name—concentrates solely on all things beery. It also predates Heritage by about four years, having broadcast the first edition of its inaugural live program, “The Sunday Live Show,” in June 2005. It was later rebranded as “The Sunday Session”—not to be confused with “Beer Sessions Radio”— and ultimately “The Session” when it moved to Mondays. It’s a fairly laid-back format, combining interviews, live interaction with the listening audience and personal craft beer and home-brew-related anecdotes from the team of hosts. Topics include everything from eco-conscious brewing and experimental homebrewing to an exploration of the beer drinking scenes in such far-flung realms as Japan. It also regularly features conversations with individual luminaries in the craft brewing world.
In addition to “The Session”—which now actually broadcasts on Mondays—The Brewing Network also produces a number of regular and semi-regular shows. Among those:
• “Brew Strong” pairs author Jamil Zainasheff with fellow homebrewer/author John Palmer, and the hosts answer live audience questions (along with those from expert guests) on beginner and advanced brewing techniques.
• “The Sour Hour” co-hosts Scott “Moscow” Moskowitz and Jay Goodwin devote each hour-plus episode to sour beers.
• “Dr. Homebrew” brings together “The Session co-host Jason “JP” Petros with BJCP master judges Brian Cooper and Lee Shephard to talk D-I-Y brewing.
Steal This Beer
In 2015 Augie Carton, founder of New Jersey’s Carton Brewing Company, ventured into podcasting with coconspirator and fellow Jersey boy John Holl, editor of All About Beer Magazine and author of The American Craft Beer Cookbook, and producer Justin Kennedy, another accomplished freelance beer writer who also produces “Beer Sessions Radio” (it’s quite an incestuous beast, this beer world). The very opinionated Garden State duo (along with special guests) dish on the week’s big beer happenings across the country—and there are quite a few in an industry with some 4,000 individual companies. Carton and Holl also perform a blind tasting on a different beer each week and analyze it on the air.
Tales from the Cask
Where “Strange Brews” is firmly rooted in Chicagoland, “Tales from the Cask” has a distinctive North Carolina accent. Hosts Jennifer Balik, Tony Walldroff, and Chip Mims work at the Raleigh-based wholesaler, Mims Distributing Company. (Chip’s the CEO of his family company, Balik’s the brand development manager, and Walldroff’s the craft and import manager.) The team kicked off the award-winning weekly podcast—it took the silver in the podcast category the same year “Strange Brews” won the gold—in 2013 and have welcomed guests ranging from Boston Beer Company’s Jim Koch and Sierra Nevada’s Brian Grossman to copyright attorneys talking about trademark issues to the distribution pros who clean the draft lines at bars. Working out of a renowned distributorship—Beverage World magazine named it Beer Distributor of the Year in 2015—gives the podcasters and enviable level of access to all facets of the beer business.