Contacting breweries and never getting a response?

I have never felt inclined to message a brewery about their beers. If you've felt the need to do this a few times within a month, that might say something about the legitimacy of your questions.

 

not I, the few times I have had to contact breweries with my concerns I was responded by a rep rather quickly and have had many issues resolved.

 

I assume you emailed them. Many breweries just don't manage the email communication channel very well. It's not uncommon. Call them.

 

I've had this experience with a very large brewery in California. However I had an issue with a bottle from elevation brewing that wasn't their fault. Bad handling from the distributor. I just wanted to let them know someone was beating the shit out of their bottles during shipping. Elevation made it right, even though it wasn't their problem. The big guys should take notice.

 

I totally hear where you're coming from and agree that calling would be best. However, I hope that in the future breweries and businesses in general realize that if they post an e-mail address people are going to use it. If they can't manage e-mail communication then take the e-mail option away.

To the OP: As I said, calling is always best, but if they posted an e-mail address then they should be equipped to handle the e-mail communication. You deserve a response, even if that response is "We have received your e-mail and will be respond with an answer/comment as soon as possible. Thank you." You don't sound entitled to me. You reached out to a brewery by way of a communication form they encouraged you to use, and then they didn't respond. That's whack.

 

I get it. I'm not totally excusing it. I just understand that many breweries are operated on a skeleton crew and sometimes the guy who would be answering the emails is also the guy who is juggling a thousand other brewery-related tasks. They get the email and write themselves a note to respond, then the grain mill breaks, the TTB rejects their label, and their only employee leaves for a server job at Applebees. Things get lost in the shuffle.

There are some really awesome artisans out there with really poor people skills. I'll take a tasty beer from a socially ******ed jerk before I'll drink swill from a polished social media guru.

 

I think you may be surprised with the small staff at a lot of fairly well-known craft breweries; which could (in part) explain a slower response time/no response at all. From managing a bar and setting up events with various breweries; I've been pretty surprised at who responds to me sometimes (regardless of the email address I sent my requests to). I've had everyone from a secretary to the owner of the brewery email me back. And, in the case of a few well-known breweries; I've been very, very shocked to learn that they don't have sales reps in the field; and that a VP handles everything personally.
Not excusing a non-response; but just tossing some relevant details into the mix.
And I definitely agree with the above comments; if you have a product issue just call the brewery directly. Much higher priority there than with emails.

 

As someone who has to deal with hundreds and hundreds of emails a day I will say just call them if the issue is that important to you. There is likely no one just sitting there waiting to deal with incoming email but I'm sure someone there would at least pick the phone up.

 

I regularly contact breweries to get the volumes of CO2 to properly balance my kegs. I've almost always gotten a reply. Sometimes it takes a few times around with them to get the number I need, but that goes more to the inexperience of the person answering the emails I think.

 

Great Divide ignored me. So I ignored them for two years. This Oatmeal Yeti best be good, s'all I'm sayin.

 

I got a bottle of completely-flat Citra Ninja, emailed pipeworks about it and they never emailed back. Kind of annoyed but still buy their beers. Would have been nice to at least have a response though.

 

I don't know why people expect a small business to be run the same way as a large business is run, i.e. a department for every facet of the business and an employee for every job. Running a small business is like walking a tightrope - it can be very precarious with overlapping responsibilities, sometimes things get lost in the shuffle and sometimes things fall off the tightrope and get lost. And sometimes it's what you say and the way you say it that may make the person on the other end question the need to reply. I'm not criticizing, just making an observation.

 

The only brewery I ever contacted was New Belgium because I was curious if they were ever going to start distributing to the Northeast, specifically MA. They got back to me promptly, but the girl who wrote the email thought MA was the abbreviation for Maine...oh well.

 

Close enough. Are they?

 

Good timing for this thread.

I've contacted upwards of 40 breweries in the past month in the hopes of getting some labels and caps for my collection. Many are breweries that don't distribute in my area. I heard back from my first inquiry from about 75% of them. I re-contacted the other 25% and of those, heard back from well more than half of them. So, of the 40 or so that I contacted, I only didn't hear back from maybe 5.

I plan to do a thread about what I received in the Breweriana sub-forum in the next few weeks. But, on an interesting note, there were 3 breweries that didn't reply to my e-mail, but I ended up getting a nice surprise in the mail from them, nonetheless.

As others have said, they're just too short staffed to get back to everyone in a timely manner, and sometimes, it's just easier to act, than to reply (at least in my example).

I think you're going to be surprised (or not) at just how generous so many of these breweries are, when it comes to their fans/customers.

 

I had good experience with the folks at New Glarus. A year or so ago I bought a t-shirt from their website them that they shipped to me here in IL. When I opened the I saw it had a hole in the neck line. I called and told them what happened when I said I can ship it back they said don't worry about it and they'd send me a new one. When I got the new shirt shirt there was a bottle opener in there with a hand written note saying that they were sorry and thanks for being a customer of theirs. Super cool.