(ed. note: I always thought it would be fun to cut a heel promo.)

I want to tell you something really important about your brewery. 

It’s going to sound patronizing, and it’s going to sound obvious, and it’s going to sound as though I am being condescending. Possibly, I am, but please know that it comes from a place where I’ve spent hours and weeks and months looking at your websites over a decade and a half. I’m saying it now because we’re in a recession and social media is fracturing in new and interesting ways that ensure the only engagement you’re getting is from Elon’s army of porno bots.

There’s no gentle way to say this: Your brewery is a business. 

Your brewery operates to sell a luxury good that contains a small amount of alcohol to people who quite like a small amount of alcohol. Some of those people like a small amount of alcohol so much that they have switched to non-alcoholic beer, which is a very bougie luxury good with the fun bits removed. If you make one of those, the previous statement still applies to you, although the likelihood is that you’ve already got a handle on that.

Maybe you have extremely unlikely goals of changing the world with your 500 hL contract brand. Maybe you have environmental targets that would be easily met by your brewery just not existing in the first place. Maybe you had a nice trip to Germany one time and six years in you’re in way over your head and your house is mortgaged so you can keep the lights on. 

Your brewery is a business, and without meeting the basic goals of a business, your brewery isn’t going to make it.

This is why I find it so confounding when I update the spreadsheet of Ontario breweries so I can update the map. Theoretically, you are meant to make it as easy as possible for people to buy your beer. Frequently, this is not the case.

I want you to imagine, just for a minute, that you are not running a brewery. I want you to imagine that you are running something like a bakery or a drugstore or a jiffy lube. You know. A business. 

You would want people to know where you are, right? You would want them to be able to contact you so they could get a muffin or some toothpaste or a new oil filter? They would need to know what your hours are so they could make a plan to stop in! They might want to know what the phone number is so they could check on the price of a cake, or whether you have covid vaccines in stock, or whether you can work on an Audi. Maybe they could email you about it if there was an email address available.

Right? Actual business stuff. I’m glad we agree. For a minute there I thought you liked inaccessible baked goods like some anchorite pining for a scone on the other side of town. That’s what instagram is for. 

The number of websites for breweries I see where this information is not in a predictable place is absurd. I have seen contact information under the About Us section, the Contact Us section, the Locations section, and just sprinkled at random at the bottom of some pages or not others. Frequently, what I end up with is a website with no phone number and a google listing that precedes the website with a phone number that might or might not be accurate. 

Look, we’re going into some down months for the brewing industry and I want you to pretend that your website is the website for a large local business in your town. Pretend you’re selling real estate or that you are a popular restaurant. Scroll through your website and see how user friendly it is. Does it incorporate browser shattering graphics (lookin’ at you, Monkeys)? Does it include a Squarespace running video of ballet performers in your dining room (Braii)?

Is that what people want? Two minutes of expository nonsense before they can see a product or make contact? Do you know what people’s attention span is in 2023? Their ADHD meds are on klonopin for anxiety. 

If you’re running a brewery, you don’t get to declare a separate peace with people attempting to contact you to purchase your product. I know. You’re under 40 and you don’t like answering the phone. It gives you anxiety. The thing that should give you anxiety is that you spent nearly a million bucks on 20 tons of steel during a boom and your lease is going to get renegotiated. Answer the phone, would ya? Place your contact information prominently on your website and have someone actually respond to queries in real time. Pretend it’s the 80’s. Get your shoulder pads out. It’ll be fun. 

Ah, that’s right. I mentioned instagram. 

Do you know what a basilisk is? Cockatrice? Gorgon? Basically mythical creatures that capture your gaze and don’t let go, rendering you inert and immobile. 

Social media is one of those. I keep having to explain this to people. Let’s say you’re a mid size brewery that has been around since 2017. You have 5000 followers? Those are the same followers you’ve always had. You’ve been talking to the same people since 2017. Oh, sure, the size of the group has expanded over time, but it’s the same people. Those people are older now. They’ve been through a lot. Some of them are drinking non-alc products. Some of them don’t look at the app for weeks. Or ever.

You could worry about engagement on your posts and watch that sad slow decline over the next couple years while you backlight your NEIPA in a field of snow and hope for only the good emojis to come up. Or, you could automate posting, and stop depending on it as if it mattered. Do me a favour: over the next ten posts create a Venn diagram of how many of the people who like your posts are the same. Are you advertising to the same fifty people all the time? How many hours of your day is that taking up?

The purpose of your brewery is to sell beer. It is not to facilitate online engagement via hashtags. Don’t get those two things confused.

Twitter? Listen, I have to stay on there to track brewery accounts and complain about transit, but you aren’t going to get positive engagement there. Twitter is for yelling, so while it’s a good source of gladiatorial combat, you run a business and should consider yourself above that unless it’s going to move some kegs.

Instagram? Do me a favour and check your conversions to sales from instagram. Do you even have that metric? What’s your call to action there, “link in bio?” Are you mostly just checking out what other people are doing? Is that how you heard about Cold IPA? Is that why you’ve made various decisions about your business? Really? 

Facebook? Your website is a Facebook page? You spent half a mike on tanks and steel and lease and your website is a Facebook page? Whose uncle are you?

I’ve never heard any discussion about which breweries are going to migrate to Bluesky or Mastodon or Threads or whatever, so you may just assume that your continued engagement in a rapidly bifurcating ecosystem is going to yield fewer and fewer positive results. 

If only there were a single place people could go to get all the pertinent information about your business. There is. It’s your website. Somewhere Tim Berners-Lee stands triumphant.

And, for the record, if you’re going to have a website and social media, would it kill ya to actually link the buttons on your website to your social media accounts. Would it shock you to learn that about 5% of the brewery websites in Ontario have a twitter button that links to twitter rather than a specific account. You get what you pay for.

Hey, incidentally, does your website include the hastily assembled online store that you put up at the beginning of COVID, or are you linking to a separate Shopify? Do you still have a banner size flash ad from 2020 that says home delivery is now a possibility for your brewery? No one wants to be reminded of the last three years. I’m guilty of referencing that period myself and nothing takes the wind out of a group conversation faster than reminding people problems might still exist. Maybe fold that sales space into the website, and contemporize to the bruised, bleeding now. 

Next week: Going outside and talking to new people.