What the hell is happening to beer? Ask any industry veteran, consulting company, brewery, distributor, or bar owner what 2024 has in store for them and you could get every possible answer. The industry will go up, down, left, and right. Beer is dying. Beer is thriving. Beer needs a facelift. Beer is at the top of its game.

Marketing efforts should always ladder up to the commercial goals of an organization, to be sure, but Marketing's #1 job is to defend the brand and keep it specific, strong, and purposeful. If you're looking for a quick and effective customer data point to see how your messaging is landing, try this brief survey below, which is (IMHO) the most important metric a marketing team can track.

I’m back with a post about beer, brewing technology, and the go to market strategy behind these extremely clever, and rather unfortunate, homebrewing machines.

Why, in an industry so obsessed with branding, are we leaving the opportunity to brand beer when it’s poured to patrons? Why aren’t signature glasses more of a thing in America?

So what makes a great pub? In my opinion, a great pub has a “come as you are” attitude with a culture of hospitality and a dedication to quality.

Do you think TVs have a place in our country’s pubs, restaurants, and breweries? Are they too ubiquitous? Are they necessary in creating the atmosphere people want when they go out?

There’s a concept called “Cognitive Beer Dissonance.” It’s coming to terms with what we hear about the beer industry and what we actually see when we go out and look.

I’d like to present a preposterous new marketing concept that will, no doubt, cause a few eyes to roll: The age of launching a beer across an entire national distribution footprint is dead. Long live local.

Dirty draft lines are a systemic problem. There’s no excuse for it, but frustratingly, there are multiple parties on the hook that need to come to a comprehensive solution on the issue. In short, the entire industry needs to pitch in to address the issue more aggressively and make draught line cleaning a required best practice on premise.

Beer has to be delivered in trucks. These trucks are, for the most part, owned and managed by distributors. Distributors (also called "Wholesalers") are big business in the United States and most of you know nothing about them. This is a problem for you and even more relevantly, for them

I think we've forgotten how to talk to each other. It's 2018 and we've...apparently...lost the innate, human, crucially important ability to share a moment with someone else without a small dose of judgment, scorn, or implied bias. I feel like I'm obligated to take a stance in order to be heard these days, and I'm not so sure I like that.

I'll admit that while its lost a lot of its authenticity through mass marketing and message dilution, "craft" is still a powerful driver of brand positioning, maintaining a certain inimitable resonance through the recent and impressive industry growth and signifying a powerful level of intentionality, purpose, and yes, counter culture resistance to mass market fizzy yellow beer.

Money talks. It's the loudest talker in the room actually. The best, and worst, things in the world are done for the sake of money. Craft beer is a business.