For the past several years if you measure success by volume, number of breweries, or fan-base size, craft beer is growing strong. I had an interesting chat at the 2015 Beer Bloggers and Writers Conference in Asheville with Jessica Miller of Hey Brewtiful about what that growth meant to craft beer and its bloggers.

Quick background

I grew up in a Tennessee suburb where as a kid I watched an army of national chains slowly absorb most of the mom and pop hangouts. I’m envious of people who grew up around here who can visit great places they knew as a kid. Local favorites thrive here because the community talks about them the same way Nanas brag about their grandchildren.

1. It’s Good For Brands When Bloggers Have Day Jobs

Like me most bloggers attending BBC make their living doing something else. I design and develop WordPress websites, but also build social media audiences and reach out to bloggers on behalf of clients. It’s something I enjoyed in California, but adore in Western Massachusetts.

People here are vocal about what they love. If they blog they’re likely reaching as many people chatting at their day jobs. Those are the conversations that reach crossover audiences, people who weren’t already looking for information. A beer brand might not see the value of a blog run by a grade school teacher, but I read a hilarious re-tweet on Twitter from one who said,

“I hate to burst your bubble, but when the kids go home, we DRINK.”

So when it’s quitting time in Cubicle-Land people aren’t Googling for beer recommendations, they’re asking that girl or guy in the office who has tried every craft beer made within 50 miles of my desk.

2. Small Towns Can Support Great Things

People around here think of the entire Pioneer Valley as “local.” Greenfield is a great example. It’s not a huge town, but it’s supported local projects-turned-national brands like Real Pickles and Pierce Brothers Coffee. It’s currently rallying around new businesses like Artisan Beverage Cooperative and Lefty’s Brewery as they branch out nationally too.

It’s easy to find those products in Greenfield, but you’ll also find them at the upscale Northampton package store Provisions or hole in the wall breakfast spots like The Roadhouse in Belchertown. No matter how small the town is around here, you’ll find local brands front and center, and local people talking about them.

3. Skip The Pretense

Despite the fact this area churns out some of the country’s hippest stuff, the hipster factor of Western Massachusetts is minimal. Yes, I know millennials in the area living in hand-crafted yurts and others making their own limoncello, but they aren’t obnoxious. They’re curious go-getters who don’t think you have to be elitist or annoying to try things. The cooperative culture is a part of every community here, from the farm shares to magazine startups to freelance writers. We help each other, and the hippest thing in the world is people doing what they love. A brand doesn’t need to give away a promotional beard wax to get attention, just share what they love with their local fans.

Foster Your People

Grass roots advocacy is what gets brands noticed outside their home court. Passion is contagious. When outsiders see a town excited about a place to get tacos or beer or ice cream they want in on that. No matter where you are though there are bound to be bloggers living close to you that are excited about what you’re doing. Get to know your grass rooters. Even if their audiences seem small, the passion they have for the local scene is invaluable to brands who want to grow.

Live from San Diego, it’s BBC14!

Molly and I are at the Beer Bloggers Conference in San Diego. So far, it’s been the kind of fun you would expect from an elaborately curated beer-tasting event.

We’ve tried a lot of good beer, and some really spectacular ones too. The thing that stuck in our brain the most after day 1 though was a talk given by Julia Herz. It was a feisty call to arms, sort of what I’d imagine a TED Talk would be like if Amy Sedaris spoke about why humor is so goddam important! (TED, Amy, Get on that.)

What beer can learn from wine

I work with winemakers a lot, both small production and large. I like wine, but beer is where I feel at home. One thing I love about the winemakers I know though, is their keen desire to educate. Wine advocates may be perceived as snobs from the outside, but they crack as easily as a good creme brulee, and love to bring people under the tent and guide them through the experience. Until Herz’s talk yesterday I never thought of beer as something that needed that kind of stewardship. Beer has always felt to me like it belonged to everyone. Cue Napoleon Dynamite: Idiot!

Beer quality at an all-time high

I had an interesting conversation recently with some wine folks about how it’s easier than ever in California to make really good wine. The problem is finding a way to let people know about it. Not too long ago you had to be careful, especially at the lower and middle price points, or you’d come home with wine you wouldn’t even want to cook with. Today though, the standards are high and the consumer is educated. Coming home with bad wine is a near-impossible achievement.

The same is true of the beer scene. It’s not hard at all to find great beer. We pick up something new every week and though we have our favorites, we’ve yet to get anything we’d classify as bad. If we don’t love it, we always agree it’s perfectly drinkable and leagues better than mass-market crap.

Why beer needs bark

Sitting around with a bunch of beer bloggers and thinking about advocacy is weird. I don’t need to sell any of these people on beer. Bub Gourmand is as much about food and cooking as it is beer, and listening to Herz yesterday I wanted to smack myself in the forehead. I think a lot of bloggers probably felt as though Herz had slapped us on the forehead. Her message, to me, was that as beer bloggers we aren’t here to preach to the choir. We aren’t simply fans yelling with other fans in the bleachers. We’re advocates and educators, and if we’re not, we should be.

Our Venison Chili recipe, for example. We used beer to make it, and we ate it alongside beer. The pairing was natural and perfect. So why didn’t we say much about that? Because we figured pairings would happen naturally. It seemed as obvious to us as using a spoon to eat the chili. Just because we like certain foods with certain beers doesn’t mean everyone will.

Herz got me thinking about that post and others, and how ignorant that assumption was. If people go into wine shops with questions like, “I’m making fish/BBQ Brisket/poached kangaroo tonight, what wine would you recommend?” why not approach beer the same way? Seems to us that beer is often picked up for its own sake. Other than pizza and pretzels, what are we as beer advocates telling “non-beer drinkers” about food pairing?

Pitch your niche

I’m not saying every beer blog should be pushing food pairings. That’s just where we’re coming from. I haven’t met a single person at this conference though that feels like a competitor. Every blogger is bringing their own thing to the craft beer scene. Herz showed us all sorts of love, but pointed out that something many of us have in common, other than our love of beer, is that we aren’t necessarily welcoming the uninitiated. We have passion, and awesome content, but are we writing with those newbies in mind?

Herz said repeatedly to think before we push PUBLISH. I’m sure everyone proofreads and edits. We put in keywords, and headers, and all that other SEO-friendly, eye-pleasing stuff. But in the same way that we carefully choose what we say around children, do we think about those people drinking crappy beer, or who say they don’t like beer, or that they prefer cocktails?

That’s like a kid saying they hate vegetables. Bullshit kid. You hate broccoli or peas and a lazy parent has just let that take down the hundreds of other healthy alternatives. A good parent doesn’t force the kid to eat peas, they put the hundreds of other nutritious options in front of them until they find something that picky brat loves. Goodness achieved!

As beer lovers it’s great to celebrate the love with each other, but as the craft beer boom keeps booming, shouldn’t we be good parents too? the kids will love us for it!

Beer at Home

The average cost of a craft six pack is $10. There are always more expensive options. One of my favorites, Ballast Point’s Habanero Sculpin, is around $15 and last week we bought the variety pack, Petrus Sour Power, for $24. So we don’t mind spending more to get something special. We buy beer most every week because we like to have options in the fridge. The advantages are obvious: drink what we want, at our own pace, and at the end of the night we don’t have to drive anywhere.

The National Beer Bloggers Conference

For the last 2 years we’ve attended the national Beer Bloggers Conference. The cost for admission has been $120 per person. For that amount we get beer, panel discussions, brewery tours, swag, several meals, and transportation to and from the various activities. It starts on a Friday and runs all day and night until Sunday afternoon. If you’re from out of town there’s travel and accommodation to factor in, but as far as the event itself goes the entrance fee has you covered.

The WTF math of Festival Beer

Since we’ve been back in the area there have been several regional beer festivals. After reading up on them we’ve gotten excited about each one. Most of them take place on 2 day’s worth of evenings and feature 40+ local breweries. Food is on site and available for purchase. The events have all sounded great, but we haven’t gone to any of them. Why? Because the cost for these festivals is about $40 per person, per day. The per day part is crazy to us.

If I went into Spirit Haus and saw a six pack advertised for $10, picked it up and was then told at the counter that price was actually only for 3 of the beers, I’d politely switch it out with something else. It’s not the expense that would turn me off, it would be the deliberately misleading labeling. If instead there were several interesting “3-packs” advertised as $10 I’d most likely try them all.

Festivals get even worse

If you’re a vocal and passionate supporter of local craft beer you’d want to sample all participating breweries, but at these festivals that’s not possible unless you go to both nights of the event. Why? Because half the breweries are there one night, half the other. That’s like the hypothetical six pack above being a variety pack, the store only selling you 3, and asking you to return the following night (but only between 5pm and 10pm) to purchase the remaining 3.

If it sounds like I’m telling local beer festivals to go to hell, I’m not. You can’t insult someone who has spit in your face, taken your money, and walked away laughing.

To top it off festivals don’t seem to care about safety. Many people spending that much for one 4-hour day of an event are going to try their damnedest to get their money’s worth. Festivals don’t include any sort of transportation options in their admission prices. That means that if a person were to responsibly hire a car, go to both days of an event, and purchase food each evening they were there, the festival would wind up costing substantially more than a national, all-inclusive conference. That seems extremely exploitative to us.

Suggestions?

We think a beer festival should be about 2 things: getting great, hard-working local breweries the attention they deserve and providing a safe, unique place for local beer fans to enjoy themselves. I hope festival organizers make money for themselves in the process, but that can’t be the main point of these things as we feel it is now.

We have three suggestions:

1. Charge one, low admission for the entire event and then sell a flexible quantity of drink tickets so that festival-goers don’t feel compelled to drink so much they can’t even see straight to call an Uber.
2. Have ridesharing forums on festival websites.
3. Have all breweries in attendance every day of the festival.

We’d love to hear your ideas too, so comment below!

Recently we dined at a restaurant we’ve been meaning to try for awhile and most everything about the experience was awful. We won’t be naming names, but it did spark an interesting conversation between Molly and I over how tipping should go after you’ve had an across-the-board disaster.

Restaurants. A Great Place For Young Folks To Work

I spent 15 years working at least part time in restaurants. It’s what gave me my appreciation of great food, the experience of dining out, and the desire for those in my care to enjoy themselves. I could never do it again. The pay is horrible, but mostly it’s the treatment you get as a restaurant staffer – which is, nearly without exception, insufferable.

Hungry People Behaving Badly

Restaurant dining brings out the worst in many otherwise civilized people. They’re sort of like polar bears. Super cute right? But have you ever seen footage of a polar bear ripping a seal apart? It’s not cute. In my experience there’s a polar bear inside of roughly one third of diners. All it needs to come out is the tiniest tinge of impatience or hunger.

No matter how upset these polar bears gets in any other professional relationship I’d be willing to bet they’d never dream of treating anyone as poorly as they do their servers. For the smallest amount of cash, these polar bears think they’ve purchased the right to degrade their server as much as they like.

When you have to deal with a surly or unresponsive server it probably isn’t because they’re jerks. The vast majority of restaurant folk are just trying to avoid getting eaten alive by a polar bear.

But what about when the service sucks?

If a server is extremely busy and knows they can’t give everyone the best service, triage begins. The higher the check and the lower the level of time needed to attend to someone determines who gets the attention first. If you’re getting bad service it’s probably for one or more of the following 3 reasons:

• You aren’t spending much, and therefore aren’t tipping much.
• Your waiter lost it and is just trying to make it to the end of their shift as best they can.
• You’re a time-devouring pain in the ass.

This last one doesn’t mean you’re a jerk. You most probably aren’t. You’re probably a really great person who deserves good service every time you go out; it’s just you’re going to consistently be the last priority for your server because of that time consumption part of the equation.

It’s often not the server’s fault that things have fallen apart, but the blame is thrown on them.

The take-home pay for everyone else working in that restaurant is unaffected by a bad tip.

That means if the kitchen screws up, very often the server is the only one who gets shafted. And when things go south like that the server has to make a decision: do I piss off this one person, or do I piss off everyone?

Sometimes too you just get crap service.

You’re in a great mood, you want a nice meal, you’re willing to drop some significant cash, you’re ready to order in a timely fashion, you’re friendly and happy to be there, and you just get ignored by your server for no explicable reason. This was our experience recently. We were greeted by a rude hostess and ruder manager, given painfully unfriendly and slow service, and were rewarded with poorly-cooked food. It was a complete failure, but I still left our server 20 percent.

Why The Good Tip?

My thinking is if you tip the obligatory 15 percent for a bad experience, you’re confirming the worst reality of a server’s existence. If you give them a good tip, however, you’re giving them hope in what often seems a thankless job. You’re motivating them by showing appreciation even when they know they probably didn’t give you the best experience.

At the end of the day your server is your ambassador to everyone else on the staff, and all of those people don’t need your tip. For the best experience you want an ally, not an enemy. You make allies by treating them like valuable assets, instead of servants.

Molly’s rebuttal:

I also worked as a server a couple summers during college.  It doesn’t take years of experience at fancy restaurants to realize this is a tough, thankless job. I figured that out about a week into my short serving career. I busted my ass to try to make everything as delightful as possible for every table I had, assuming they’d see how hard I was scrambling, how carefully I watched their glasses, how I hit the perfect balance of friendly yet unobtrusive, hoping they’d acknowledge all of that in the tip they left.  

Some did.  And some left me nothing but a photocopied slip of paper listing “50 things money can’t buy”. I know that little photocopied gem was not a reflection of my job performance, but rather some kind of bizarre get-out-of-jail-free card for their guilt.

15 percent tip is an adequate tip.

It’s not great and it’s definitely not ideal (ideal would be abolishing the tipping system altogether and paying servers a living wage) but barring that, 15 percent is fine. It’s kinda like those old-school report cards where the teachers just used to write “satisfactory”…not “exemplary.” 

In my mind, leaving 15 percent is like leaving the message “I hereby acknowledge that without you, this dining experience would not have been possible. Thanks for doing this very difficult, very demoralizing, very low-paying job. ” Notice I didn’t say “doing your job well/cheerfully/efficiently/etc”; just thanks for doing it.  I don’t expect to be treated like royalty every time I step into a diner or brewpub, but I do expect my server to make an effort.

No one’s going to get rich being a server or even really be able to make a sustainable career out of it, unless our entire country makes some enormous shifts in its thinking.  Look, I’m not saying “if they don’t like their job find another one”, which is often an asshole’s response to low-income workers being unhappy with their jobs.  There are reasons people work these jobs and there are legitimate reasons why they stay; I get that.  I think Matthew missed another option in his list of possible explanations for poor service:

• The server has a bad attitude, is not cut out for the job (it’s HARD), or is just personally having a crap day and is taking it out on his/her diners.

And for that, 15 percent is more than acceptable.

A little over a year ago I lived in Northern California. I worked for the two years I was there for a Digital Marketing Agency, and we had several wineries as clients. I cut my teeth in social media and blogger outreach on those accounts. I was impressed with how engaged most were with the people vocal about their wine online. They regarded those conversations as an essential connection to both existing and perspective fans.

You are not a product

I was on a conference call with a winery once, and someone used the word “product” to describe the wine in a campaign we were all working on. Someone from the winery interrupted the conversation. They said that “product” lost the importance of the relationship between the winery and its advocates, and shouldn’t be used. The word reduced things to a financial transaction.

I thought they were being melodramatic. I thought, Come on! Your wine is a product. The more I thought about it later though, the more I agreed with, even admired, the person who’d stopped the meeting over the use of the word. The winery was obviously interested in increasing sales. That’s why they’d hired us. At the core of everything though, was a sincere passion for the wine they made. They realized their fans shared that passion and that’s what made those conversations on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram so important.

Sadly, I don’t see that level of online engagement from many craft breweries.

I met some amazing brewers at the 2014 and 2015 Beer Blogger’s Conference, and some lovely Reps at various tastings. They’ve all been generous with their time and their beer. I even had a long conversation in a grocery store with a driver for a local brewery a few months back. He helped me pick out a beer for a dinner I was making, and it wasn’t even from his brewery! In short, I adore brewers. They’re the coziest people in the world when you meet them in person. The problem is their engagement on social media is often one-sided, robotic, sterile even. It’s like being stuck on a service call with a digital recording that never connects you to a real person.

A model social media citizen

Here’s where numerous wineries excel at forming online relationships. Let’s look at La Crema Winery. They found our blog on Twitter. They, a winery, followed us, a beer blog. We were surprised, but checked them out and followed back. What the hell. We like wine! We look for their wines on menus now and try them when we see them. Although we definitely drink more beer than wine, as a result of their engagement, we actively listen to what they have to say.

Take a look at their Twitter account: La Crema Winery

When you look at their feed you see that they’re following a good percentage of their fans back. They’re also re-tweeting things those fans care about, some of which don’t even have anything to do with their wine. That sort of engagement shows they see themselves as part of a bigger picture, that their fans are more than just revenue.

I’m tired of talking about me, why don’t you talk about me?

Now let’s look at one of our favorite breweries: 21st Amendment Brewery

We followed their feed for a while, because we buy their beer and are interested in what they’re doing. Like a lot of breweries though, we no longer follow them. Why? Well, none of our mentions or likes or re-tweets resulted in any sort of conversation. We still buy their beer and love it, but as far as social media goes, what’s the point in following someone who never interacts? It’s like inviting someone to a party and all they want to do is stand on a chair and recite poetry.

When you look at their Twitter feed you see a huge fan base, but they’re following the tiniest fraction of their supporters in return. They’ve liked a bunch of posts, but every last one of those seem to be about them.

There’s nothing really wrong with that. Oprah doesn’t follow anyone. Neither do a lot of wineries for that matter. It’s a totally legit way to make use of social media. It’s just not interesting to people actively using social media. The active users are people looking for information to entertain and educate themselves (yes, it actually is used for that too). When those people find something that excites them, they share it with their followers. The passive people just there to collect information from your passive Twitter account aren’t terribly influential. They’re not getting the word out.

Ultimately, everyone is promoting something on social media. If that’s all you’re doing though, you’re missing an opportunity to connect with your biggest advocates. I’ve never heard anyone say, “I saw this great advertisement on Twitter today.”