Do (successful) breweries give a damn?

In this age of social media, you have to have a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc account. The breweries may be busy with business/brewing tasks and through triage have relegated checking social media as least important. If they do have a dedicated IT/ customer service person, then shame on them.

 

Email is the best way to contact any business in my experience.

 

It isn't the statement and more the method. Email is better than social media, which has 10000x more noise.

 

Stannis Baratheon doesn't partake in things of joy...which would disqualify him from enjoying a pint of ale.

 

I think anyone who whines about lack of social media replies by breweries should get 24 hours to be in charge of these accounts for a major brewer and then come back and share their thoughts.

 

If a brewery/company doesn't care about their customers (who are paying them money), imagine how they treat their employees, vendors, and community.

The quality of engagement and interactions should actually improve with scale and success, not get worse. IMHO

 

I suppose I can understand not wanting to reach out to them in yet another channel after the effort you already expended. It just seemed to me like email would be the place to start, since of all the options at your disposal, it is most ideally suited to the type of communication you needed to send.

 

I am 3 for 6 on emails. I have found many company's ignore email. Even for requests on info for their products.

Interesting is from breweries

3 for 3 responses when I sent a compliment.
1 for 2 on requests for information
0 for 1 on complaining

 

I agree that most breweries should (and most probably do) have these, but IMO social media is mostly used for less "important" things such as release schedules, what is brewing brewed when, and less for direct conversations with the consumers.
For something like the OP, an email would be the best way to get in touch - with exactly what is wrong, identifications from the bottle (batch number whatever is there,) and so forth. As others said, each social media platform has their own limitations, and just simply the amount of traffic each would get - in twitter, for example, they'd probably have to wade through hundreds if not thousands of "drinking a #XYZ Brewing #ABC IPA #yum #blah blah blah" to get to one specific complaint.

 

My personal reply rate to such requests is about the same

 

30 years ago, my cousin (age 18 at the time- and not of legal age) got a bad bottle of strohs. He wrote a letter to them. 3 weeks later a delivery truck stopped in front of his house and left 3 cases of beer. His dad answered the door not knowing exactly what was going on. This story still gets talked about over beers. So Strohs, at one time, cared for customers.

 

Here's what happened (Names redacted) when I emailed Lost Abbey. It's a thread. Start at the bottom. Always send email - preferably to a real live person. I went to LA's website and found a customer service name, emailed that person and a couple days later had a fresh beer delivered (overnight) to my house along with a pint glass. They will always kick ass as far as I'm concerned.


_______________________________________________________________________________________

The next email I got was this:




________________________________________________________________________________


This tracking update has been requested by:


Company Name:

Port Brewing

Name:

Tomme Arthur

E-mail:

[email protected]

Message:

Thank You! Cheers!


________________________________________________________________________________

 

I have been to FFF numerous times and have had only 1 questionable experience. That place can be an absolute madhouse sometimes. Even if there was someone standing by the phone when you called(highly unlikely), they would have seen a phone call from New York and assumed it to be a solicitation of some sort. I didn't even think that they distributed to NY...... I believe the phone line is mainly a prepared voice message to let you know what is available to go for that day.

I really don't get all the hate sometimes for FFF. I would take a hundred Three Floyd's before another brewery putting out mediocre to garbage beers for the same cost as some world class beers.

 

My experiences have been mixed. When I worked as a beer manager, I sent many e-mails trying to decipher freshness codes and the like, receiving a response maybe 50% of the time (the best coming from a Brazilian brewery, who sent a large response detailing what every bit of their codes meant). As a consumer, I haven't reached out to too many breweries, and have gotten a response from a select few of them. The worst has been Brewmesieter, who never shipped an order I placed with them in 2013, never answered me back about my concerns (this via e-mail and Twitter on a number of occasions spanning several months), and basically stole the money I PayPal'ed them (unfortunately, thanks to a long shipping projection, by the time I knew an issue was afoot, PayPal wasn't able/willing to do anything about the situation).

In the end, it's not the size or success of the brewery that matters in this discussion, but rather their level of damn-giving in general.

 

2 Breweries come to mind when it comes down to giving a damn......Sixpoint and Dogfish !!!

 

Some I have contacted about issues have been great, some have not...

Just randomly firing off a quick tidbit isn't going to do much, a well thought-out written word will probably do a lot better.

 

I'm 1 for 1. Sent Fifty-Fifty a question via email about their growler policy. Got a response within a couple of hours.

My personal interaction at various beer festivals or onsite at breweries has been outstanding. In general, I think that this is a minor problem in this industry...

 

I have found that in-person and phone call contacts trump easily-ignored emails.