Do brewers read BA reviews?

Yeah me too... well just one brewery.... a certain brand that was the center of a heated ruckus on here last year.

 

I posted a comment in a thread over a year ago about a bottle of White Birch that I nearly put my eye out opening, the cap blasted off of it. Dan BM'd me asking for batch information, so that he could look into it. I was really pleased that he did, I'd rather help out the brewer than continue to bitch about their QC.

 

I have had a couple brewers get back to me--one positive and one super negative.

 

They read one or two then realised it was pointless.

 

It seems that, especially with Yelp, that most of the glowing reviews could be written by owners/employees or friends/family of employees. I read a review of a local place that just ripped 'em apart for their service. I know that this place has very good service, so I pointed the review out to the owner and floor manager. Turns out the group had made a reservation for 8pm, when they hadn't shown up by 8:30, the restaurant gave their table away. Group shows up at 8:45 and immediately starts bitching about why isn't their table ready. They wrote just a terrible review that had nothing to do with the quality of food, or how the service actually was, once they were seated.

There's probably a similar story behind a lot negative restaurant reviews, which is why I take Yelp with a healthy dose of skepticism. As far as reviews here, well we are the enthusiasts of beer, so probably tend to be both tougher, and more forgiving. Maybe a brewers take BAs & RBs user input a bit more seriously, but as a consumer, I'd never let a bad review stop me from trying a beer, or restaurant, that I'm interested in.

 

Funny you mentioned Sixpoint. My good friend checked into Resin on Untappd and got a comment directly from Shane asking him how he liked it! We were all pretty blown away by it; I thought it was awesome.

 

Yelp I use often, but I like to go to one place more than once if I can before writing something up, mostly to have something different on the menu, perhaps different time of day, or group of people, so forth. Yelp suffers often from a lot of no material to the reviews, with such banal lines as "the margaritas here are like so awesome"... ok ??? why?? do they even use real lime juice? etc.. how about some explanation? The second being is that it also suffers from a very Me first attitude, where people just want to be the first to review a place just for the sake of being first. It's very easy to take many reviews with a grain of salt and weed out the ones that seem to complain with nothing to back it up with, some are valid too and that goes for any "review site".

And just for the record, yes I have been contacted.

 

You do remember correctly. I do answer many emails from customers. I do not read reviews, nor do I know any serious brewers who do. Many people find this controversial, or even obnoxious. The fact is, there are only a few reasons to read reviews by members of the public who you do not know personally. (1) You hope to be flattered. Well, everyone likes to be flattered. And then you can end up believing your own press, which is truly obnoxious. (2) You want to know what the "general public" thinks of your beer. Well, (a) BA is not the general public, and there is, in fact no way to know who's up here, and (b) what might you actually do with this "information"? "Nothing" is not an acceptable answer (see #1, above). Would you change your beer? Why....in hopes of making more money? Is it not the beer you intended to make? Do you think that anyone knows the beer you intended to make more than you do? If so.....why are you here?

Beer isn't a restaurant. The music can't be too loud, and the service can't be bad. It's not a service. The beer is the beer. If it has technical problems, the brewery, sometimes (though hopefully not) with the help of the general public, should discover them. But the idea that a brewer should be following his/her own reviews is bizarre unto itself. Reading the reviews will either result in no action taken (and therefore no reason to read them) or action taken (changing your vision to fit public taste - go work for McDonald's, then). I'll put it this way - can you imagine how disappointed you'd be if you discovered that Bob Dylan had focus-grouped his albums and then feverishly followed public reviews? Wouldn't that make you slightly ill? Sure, none of us is Bob Dylan, but if you're not trying to be an artisan, then what's the point?

Some people want it both ways. They would like to have iconoclastic artists who will actually listen to them and take their advice. Well, the fact is that you can't have that, no matter what anyone tells you. Discussions are one thing - I discuss our beers with people all the time, whether be email or in person, and it's fun to do. But I think that if you really thought about it, you'd realize that you don't actually want brewers focus-grouping their beers to public wishes. Even if they're yours.

 

If you're looking to appeal to a consumer market then I think it's in your best interest to read the reviews. They can even make it easy and set up a Google Alert to email a daily digest of reviews and other web mentions of their beer. Makes it quick and easy.

 

Yes they do. I had a beer from a brewery that was way off and they asked me where I purchased it. It doesn't have to be about breweries seeing what is good or bad about their beers rather it can also be situations where an off batch might be identified.

 

Wouldn't you want to know if a beer you produced became infected for some reason or had some QC issues? The general public wont really be the ones letting you know. Of course it happens from the "general public", but most people aren't that driven. It'll be the people here and other similar websites that discover these problems and proactively bring them to the attention of everyone be it through reviews, forum posts or word of mouth. There are plenty of people that if they bought a beer that wasn't good for whatever reason would just never buy it again and what good does that do to a brewery and brewer? There needs to be some fine line where a brewer puts hubris aside and uses the information given to him/her. If you brew a beer that you think is perfect in every way and it keeps getting consistantly bad reviews here, would you keep brewing the exact same beer??

 

I remember a few years ago when Yelp was getting serious flak as so many of the reviews were being gamed by the rests/bars, both pro and con. I pretty much never went back to it afterwards...

 

@Treebs - it is the job of any decent brewery to have ways of finding out whether they have serious quality control issues. Fortunately, many of us not only have very active quality control, but also plenty of public outreach. People get in touch with opinions all the time. So, to answer your question, if we heard that one of our beers was sour, we would go to investigate aggressively. But that has little to do with "reviews". Reviews are largely about whether you like something or not, and why. And if people don't like our beers, they won't sell. And any beer that sells really poorly at any brewery will eventually be cut from the roster.

@Draheim - I can see your point, as I'm also an editor ("The Oxford Companion to Beer", with 166 writers). But in a way, you made my point. You're an editor, a person with specific insights into improving writing. You're not the general public. A better analogy might be putting out a chapter of a novel for public review. Of course, this sort of thing is done all the time, from Domino's Pizza to films. And what you end up with is....a mass-market product. So editors, yes, public reviews, no. BTW, I don't read public reviews of almost anything - I'm not into crowd-sourced experiences when I don't know who the crowd is.

 

I wrote a really positive review and I got a similar BM explaining that they don't brew to style, but glad to hear I liked it or something similar.

 

I'm just wondering if reps from different breweries check sites like this to see how the craft beer community thinks about their beer. The typical answer for most of them I would guess is just a plain "No" but I think this could be a great tool for them. Not that they should react to every slight little change in opinion or trend. But if there are steady complaints/trends that progress every year they can react accordingly. For example: FFF Darklord everyone raves about how the 08 and prior recipe's were the best, if I were them I would switch back to the 08 recipe. In their case however I feel like they will just do whatever the hell they want.

 

I don't think FFF would care about what we think he thinks that they think.

 

More than a couple cases of brewer's responding to BA users about their beer have popped up here.Todd Ashman, Matt Van Wyk, and Gary Fish (not the brewer but the brewery head) come to mind. Usually they show up to address concerns or questions and are usually interesting posts. Those are just the vocal ones. I'm sure most brewer's at least want to get some feedback and check here as well as elsewhere.