Although globalization eases many of international travel’s challenges, it could threaten the brewing cultures and traditions that we seek to experience.
The art of choosing which beer to sell has become a highly competitive, data-driven process, and the tastemaking “beer buyers” with the job are often regarded as celebrity gatekeepers who can make or break upstart breweries.
In this book, author Jeff Rice parses the language and networks we use every day (like social media) to help explain how those systems impact the industry.
IntelligentX, a British brewing firm founded by Hew Leith and Dr. Rob McInerney, is using artificial intelligence to develop its beer recipes in response to user feedback.
Sean Lynch launched the Clean Beer Project, which travels to bars in New York City, scrubs down beer lines, and lets patrons know via Twitter that their favorite bar is now squeaky clean.
With the rise of mobile commerce, beer-delivery services are shaking up the status quo, from customized 24-packs to freshly filled growlers direct from local breweries.
If you don’t like a beer, don’t drink it. Life is too short and good beer is too plentiful. But do you really need to brag about your drainpour like a cretin?
If you drink a beer, and your friends aren’t instantly notified about it, did it really happen? How is technology changing the beer drinking experience for so many enthusiasts, and why are they frantically sharing their experiences anyway?
As craft brewing matures, the quality of the reportage on all things beer should rise to match it. Quality writers are a crucial component in helping craft brewing grow in stature and seriousness in the public’s eye.
Brewers need to pay more attention to reviews and the long-term quality of their beers as they flow through the marketplace—the two are unarguably connected.
While the internet has given beer lovers access to information and communication avenues that we could never have imagined decades ago, the value of many social media options to breweries is harder to gauge.
It’s Friday night. You order a beer at a bar, use an app to tick it on your list, snap a pic, broadcast it on social media, and then refresh to see how many people liked it. What happened to just ordering a beer and enjoying it with the people around you?
As craft beer continues to gobble up Big Beer’s market share, small breweries are increasingly grappling with the question of whether to handle communications in-house or farm it out to an outside PR agency.
As anybody with a kegerator knows, the impromptu parties always happen where the beers are. That’s why it’s so important to keep tabs on your taps. Kegbot is a software and hardware one-two punch that keeps track of how much beer has been poured out of a keg, so you know when to replace it.
CapSnap is a free smartphone app that helps beer drinkers keep tabs on the beers they drink with personal ratings and other details via a collection of bottle caps created by the user for each beer. It’s a lot like Pinterest for beer lovers.
To be of value, constructive criticism must be offered in an identifiable manner, whether in person or online, not through protected and anonymous channels. It must be offered thoughtfully and sympathetically, in the spirit of a joint effort toward an improved experience.
A business’ website should be the hub for all info. Social media should drive traffic to that hub, not be the hub. It should be an easy task for consumers to find information, not an unpaid part-time job.
As the relationship between breweries, brewers guilds, beer publications and beer bloggers gets cozier, hard lines are becoming more difficult to define.
The internet and social media have changed the way we connect with those who sell us the beer we love. Now we can actually communicate directly with them and tell them what we do and don’t like about what’s going on with their beer.
The complaints and expectations about beer are reaching whole new levels. And the snobbery and superiority factors among craft beer lovers over macro drinkers are becoming shameful and embarrassing.
