Bad beer and bad brewery communication

You might be a bit late LOL

I was floored though. he could have easily told me to fuck off, but the President got involved and hooked me up. I'll be a loyal fan for life after that kind of treatment.

 

Customer for life, and you will tell the story again and again. Awesome perpetual advertising and it only cost him a few bucks. Some businesses just don't get that.

 

In my experience it's only the smaller, "local" breweries that ignore emails that are important like this. Sam Adams, Stone, and others always seem to give a professional reply and even more importantly they do something about it.

 

In other words breweries who can afford to have a dedicated customer service department. I am not making excuses for anyone but this makes sense. Many small breweries do not have this luxury. It should be a priority without a doubt, however these breweries abilities to respond and the senders time line may not always align.

 

Well, hard for me to see how breweries can "afford" to have a bunch of infected beer on shelves and not know about it and/or do anything because they ignore their concerned or angry customers. They should just NOT put up a publicly availble email for consumers and just write a little F-you paragraph under the "contact us" link on their page.

 

No arguments there, however with this situation we are only left with more questions than answer. A lot of peoples "bad beer" is not always bad beer. A lot of peoples emails are not doing anything to help the senders cause. The I bought bad beer and I wanted you to know email is not going to get answered as quickly when you have a number of other emails that can be more easily answered. We can make a lot of assumptions both ways hear. Without specific incidents and information it is hard to make definitive statements.

I have had emails sent for various reasons go unanswered from breweries both big and small. I will say that any concerns I have had about questionable beer has been answered when I have sent them though I was very detailed and descriptive in my emails making it easier to respond.

 

Doesn't mean they ALL speak four languages. And with no response from either, it's either poor service or a language barrier, so I was giving the benefit of the doubt.

 

freakin amazing! just now caught my breath from laughing so hard.

 

Odell, which is much smaller than the breweries you mentioned above, certainly does not fit that bill. An email about carbonation issues resulted in an unsolicited apology, refund, tshirt, etc. I already love their beer, but now I go out of my way to get it. And I don't even live in their distro area anymore.

 

Whats with the abrupt Randys???

 

As mixed as my experience has been with their beers, I can say that their customer service has been nothing but top notch. Shane has gone out of his way to rectify any issues I have had, that alone keeps me buying some of his beers.

 

Agree. Not that they're a huge brewery, but when Russian River decided to pull out of Washington a month or two ago, I sent the brewery a quick note basically saying I've been a loyal customer for years and I'm sorry to see them go, and that I hope they decide to distribute here again someday if they reach a capacity that allows it. I got a nice message back from someone (probably someone in marketing/PR) acknowledging my email, followed later by another message directly from Vinnie. I replied, asking him for more specific information about the reason for the pullout, and he wrote back within the hour with a pretty lengthy explanation laying out how they came to the decision.

Even if they never come back to Washington, I'll remain a Russian River enthusiast based solely on their attention to their customers—past, present, and future. How a small brewery doesn't get this—that spending a few minutes simply acknowledging emails they've received from their customers can mean the difference between long-term success and failure—is completely beyond me.

 

track down the right email address too. sometimes there are multiple emails you can contact. contacting someone directly at the brewery than the generic email could get a much faster response

good luck!

 

typng teh eamil adres rite is aslo impotent

 

they reply faster that way. making it a game to decode the email.

funny thing i went back to ninja edit it and as soon as i finished up popped an alert. dammit you struck too fast

 

Never try to out-ninja a ninja.