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Prior to COVID-19, a visit to the neighborhood brewery meant bumping into former colleagues and customers from my time at Monk’s Kettle and Hog’s Apothecary. Now, the beer community is meeting up in the only way they can: virtually, through outlets like Instagram.
lessPhoto: Yelp / Stephanie Z. (left) And Daniel B. (right)Prior to COVID-19, a visit to the neighborhood brewery meant bumping into former colleagues and customers from my time at Monk’s Kettle and Hog’s Apothecary. Now, the beer community is meeting up in the
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Prior to COVID-19, a visit to the neighborhood brewery meant bumping into former colleagues and customers from my time at Monk’s Kettle and Hog’s Apothecary. Now, the beer community is meeting up in the only way they can: virtually, through outlets like Instagram.
lessPrior to COVID-19, a visit to the neighborhood brewery meant bumping into former colleagues and customers from my time at Monk’s Kettle and Hog’s Apothecary. Now, the beer community is meeting up in the
... moreI got my first job as a beer buyer in 2004. At that time there were no craft breweries within the city limits of Oakland or Los Angeles, and even San Francisco, home to the country’s original craft brewery, had only a handful. Back then curating an interesting beer list meant driving up and down the coast to places like San Diego, Pasadena and Portland to find people who were just as excited to share their favorite local beers as I was to be drinking them.
Whether as an employee, a regular patron, or a traveling scout, beer bars, breweries, and pubs, have been at the center of my social and professional lives since I was legally allowed to enter them. These past two months are the first time in almost two decades that I have gone more than a few days without being on either side of the bar with a beer in my hand.
I can tell you that it was The Black Cat in Penngrove, Calif., where I first tasted Moonlight’s “Death and Taxes,” the Third Stop near the Beverly Center in Los Angeles for Craftsman’s “Triple White Sage,” and that the first time I tasted properly presented real ale it was Stone’s “Levitation,” at The Linkery in San Diego. A decade and a half later, each of those pubs is gone, but all three of three breweries have grown mightily in prominence and esteem.
In 2015 I transitioned from working with breweries to working for one. HenHouse Brewing Company opened two years prior in my hometown of Petaluma with some fellow hometown kids at the helm. While the particulars of my job now involve a great deal more spreadsheets and sales meetings than they did before, I still rely heavily on connections I made back in my days of walking into unfamiliar breweries, bars and bottle shops. Prior to COVID-19, a visit to my neighborhood brewery meant bumping into former colleagues and customers from my time at Monk’s Kettle and Hog’s Apothecary, and drinking beers designed by brewers whom I have known since they were working bottling lines and cleaning kegs just to find a start in the industry.
HenHouse Unruffled Podcast as advertised on their Instagram page.
"Maybe we aren't where we want to be right now, but we're all somewhere. Let's have a beer."
Bob Waegner opens every episode of “5 O’Clock Somewhere,” with these words. Waegner, who is a Certified Cicerone and a Marketing Coordinator here at HenHouse Brewing Company, started “going live” on the company’s Instagram account at 5pm on March 24th, hoping “to offer a little normalcy and a bit of that pub experience.” He has been there every weekday afternoon since.
Following Bob’s lead, other employees at HenHouse have created live streams of their own. Every day around 7:00 pm you will find Sales Coordinator Wes Middleton sipping a beer and sharing bits of baseball history for a segment he calls “Take Me Back To The Ballgame.”
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“Opening day is when my year really starts, I haven't missed one in I don't know how many years,” Middleton said. “When it was delayed I started listening to old games, watching baseball movies, and reading baseball books. I figured if I was jonesing that bad, others might be too.”
Every Sunday Shausana Hogan, who works as a Shift Manager and “Flight Attendant” in our taprooms, hosts movie trivia with her sisters. “Whether it is at the trivia, Floyd (her golden retriever), or our outfits, it’s having something for everyone to look forward to in these times where everything is so unsure.”
Two months into shelter-in-place, Instagram has become a welcoming watering hole for the entire HenHouse community. There are still no happy hours, ballgames, or pub quizzes, yet hardly a day passes without some number of our employees, taproom regulars, and wholesale customers, gathering together, virtually, over beers.
Obviously, the craft-beer industry is not alone in our newfound reliance on social media. What is interesting about our embrace of Instagram in particular is that, as recently as a few months ago, the platform was a frequent subject of ridicule and caricature in certain craft-beer circles.
Back in 2017 legendary brewmaster and author, Garret Oliver caused a stir with dismissive comments he made about “New England-style IPA” and the “Instagram culture” he viewed as championing beers in that particular beer style. As recently as a few months ago, private conversations with my colleagues would often include phrases like “hype-brewery,” or “haze bros,” or “ahabs.” All of these terms carry a connotative side-eye, directed at the type of craft beer enthusiast who is most active on Instagram.
A survey of the most popular craft beer Instagram accounts yields all of the same wearying appeals to viral titillation you might expect. For those of us who’d spent years honing our recipes, noses, and palates, seeing the craft beer cutting edge shift its focus towards cosmetics on Instagram felt like a regression to the bad old days of beers promoted by proximity to C-list celebrities, bikinis, and cute dogs.
It’s not all bad. Instagram and similar social media platforms have offered small beer companies a point of connection with our audience that extends far beyond the walls of our breweries. For HenHouse, our Instagram account is as old as the brewery, and our 26,000-plus followers hail from places well beyond the availability of our beer. Two years ago during an LA Beer Week event at The Hermosillo in Highland Park, I was approached by a group of beer geeks who recognized me from HenHouse’s Instagram posts despite the fact that at that time HenHouse beer was not sold anywhere south of San Francisco.
Beny Ashburn (left) and Teo Hunter (right) of Crowns & Hops Brewery.
No one in the beer world has done more to build their audience virtually than Inglewood’s Crowns and Hops. The black-owned, brewery-to-be had just started releasing their beers for wholesale distribution as COVID-19 hit, but founders Beny Ashburn and Teo Hunter have been creating space for their community via the hashtag #BlackPeopleLoveBeer since 2014.
“We represent a community who was being ignored, who no one was building any programming for.” Hunter says, “we established ourselves on social media, primarily because we realized that we aren’t the only ones that loved craft beer but didn’t feel community when we’d step into a taproom.”
Dr. J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, who serves as the Diversity Ambassador for the Brewers Association, echoes Hunter’s experience. “On one hand, craft beer groups have been some of the most welcoming I have ever been a part of, on the other hand, I have felt my difference more profoundly there than almost anywhere else.”
Since the start of shelter-in-place in Southern California, Ashburn and Hunter have been hosting weekly “digital bottle shares” on both their Instagram and Zoom accounts. These get-togethers have garnered a sizable, dedicated audience along with a list of high profile guests. Crowns and Hops’ digital bottle shares have featured LA-based rapper Murs, actress Bresha Ward (“The Last OG,” “Black AF”), and a who’s-who of the southland’s most celebrated brewers and beer-sellers.
“For us social media is the way we communicate with our audience, it feels very natural for us to be there,” Ashburn said.
Today the sort of virtual communities that Crowns and Hops built in part as a response to being forced to the purifory, have become the center of the craft-beer world. As we are all estranged from our drinking buddies and familiar haunts, it has become clear that what the hype-beasts, haze-bros, and amateur underwear models of craft-beer Instagram understood better than us so-called experts, is that the best thing a beer can do is bring people together.
The past two months have reminded people like me that what we are drinking will never matter as much as having someone to drink with. In everything from the routine of a post-shift pilsner with co-workers, to commiserating with fellow beer-geeks lined up for the release of a trendy pastry stout, there is the recognition that everything we love about beer gets better with other people.
Thankfully, those responsible for establishing craft beer’s “Instagram culture” have been welcoming, even to those of us who were late to join the party.
Sayre Piotrkowski is the head of the Sales Department at HenHouse Brewing and Distribution in Sonoma County, CA. His 15 years in craft beer includes work at some the most elite beer-centric pubs and restaurants in the Bay Area. Starting with a stint as the in-house Cicerone and public face of The Monk’s Kettle in San Francisco and culminating as the Beverage Director and GM of The Hog’s Apothecary in Oakland.
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Miss your local bar? Try Instagram. - SF Gate
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