Twitter Follow Fridays (group back rubs)

A social meme activity has grown in the Twitterverse known as Follow Friday (or #FF for those of you who speak #hashtag). It is simply a mechanism to let other people who are interested in you, know who you are interested in.

As I wrote that, I realize how sophomoric that sounds, but that's what it is. Twitter, as a social network, does require relationships to be reciprocity. You can follow Bill, but Bill may not follow you. And that works well, maybe because you find what bill says interesting, but Bill might not feel the same about what you say. Wow, that sounds more shallow and self absorbed than it is. Bill might be very interesting and have thousands of people interested in what he is saying and it is reasonable that he would not follow everyone who follows him, regardless of how interesting he might find them. But, I digress.

Follow Friday is the popular method of saying to everyone following you: "I find these people interesting. You might also." The way it works if pretty simple and informal. On Fridays, Twitter users (or Tweeps) send a message (a tweet) with the names of people they are giving a shout out about, and then include the short hashtag (codeword) #FF. That's it! Pretty simple and not complicated.

Sometimes, peer pressure kicks in and people feel the need to reciprocate. Someone gives a shout out to there followers about me, and I might feel that I should return the favor and include them in my #FF message. I try to resist that knee jerk reaction. Although it always makes me feel good when I find that someone feels what I have to say is interesting, I feel that if you only have 140 characters to say something, you should be truthful about it. If my followers though I was just tossing out #FF names because they did it to me, it would dilute my recommendation that I find them interesting.

Sometimes, Follow Fridays seem to become huge virtual group back rubs. Everyone doing a little for everyone else, but no one really getting someones full attention.

Now, let me digress a bit into how I have begun doing Follow Fridays:

Twitter has a mechanism for flagging tweets that you find interesting as being a favorite of yours. It is real simple. You read something you like, and with a single click, it is flagged as one of your favorites. I use the favorite feature all the time. I don't always have time to read twitter, but if something catches my eye, I will flag it and will read it later. If, after I read it, I thought it a keeper, I will leave it flagged.

On Friday, I can quickly go to my favorites page and see all of the messages I found interesting. One click on the Reply icon for each and it adds it to my next tweet. Click-click-click-click, toss a #FF on the end. Maybe add a short message in it like "These made me laugh this week" and off it goes.

I hope that people that include me in there #FF messages aren't offended if I don't immediately reciprocate. Don't take it personal, I don't. I have the unfortunate predicament that I have interests in multiple, unrelated things. Winemaking, Computers, Beermaking, Science, Social behavior, Music, .... What I find interesting is probably only interesting to a distinct subset of people who follow me. I try to please everyone.

Happy Follow Friday everyone!

Who made me think this week? #ff @2020science @BadAstronomer @donttrythis @sciencebase @bayareascience @rstrohmeyer @tim_harper @maureenogle

You can follow me on twitter at @tbeauchamp, but only if you find me interesting.

Social Media: Turning an Echo Chamber into an Amplifier of a PR Campaign

A common characterization of the ecosystem of social networks, whether Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or any of the other on-line centers of virtual gathering, is that they become “Echo Chambers” for their participants, as opposed to engines of knowledge transfer.  Another term for this is “Group Think”.  This is when you bring people together and the critical mass of participants and ease of quick, bursts of comments becomes a fertile breeding ground for chatter, giving each other “props”, and reveling in the shared experience of discussion, rather than moving the discussion forward towards a useful end. 

Topics usually pop up around a central idea or event and then everyone participates and shares thoughts that circle and expand the idea.  But something interesting happens in the aggregate to the ideas.  The group’s social dynamic kicks in and reshapes the discussion.  “Shaping” probably isn’t the right term here.  It is more like filtering some aspects of the of idea and reinforcing others.

A similar effect happens in the physical world too, but with sound or light.  Sound generated in in a room will bounce off the walls and items in the room.  The dynamics of the room and all of it’s contents will dampen some sounds while allowing others to resonate.  Soon the sounds at the resonant frequency dominate the acoustics and the dissident sounds die out.  It doesn’t matter what white noise you start with, you end up with a spectrum of sound that comes out the same each time.  Nothing new, nothing original.  That is what can happens in a social network discussions also.  A topic is introduced and it quickly is molded into a similar outcome or consensus typical for that group. 

Utilizing social media as part of your marketing strategy has to be done with this phenomena in mind, sensitive to this echo chamber mechanism.  A traditional print campaign marketer might be tempted to treat the publishing event as the culmination of the PR process, not realizing that publishing the post is really just a transition from the preparation phase to the participation phase of the campaign. 

The added attention that you now have to give to your message doesn’t lessen the need for preparation and crafting of the message in the first place.  An incomplete or ill-conceived message will hit the blogosphere, Facebook ecosystem, or tweet-stream and quickly be torn to shreds for what it is.  But, even with an “on the mark” and well crafted post, setting it free in the wild requires ongoing attention and nurturing.  Unless your campaign says exactly what the community already wants to hear, it will either just be drowned out, or worse, take on a life of its own, which probably won’t be the message it was intended to be.  If the message resonates with that crowd, it will be amplified.  If it doesn’t square with what the audience wants, or what the crowd is predisposed to, your message will be molded into what fits that community's tone better, and then that will be the message that gets amplified. 

This amplification can be used to your advantage, carrying your message farther and with greater impact that just the original words themselves and form could have.  The message can evolve to live and grow in it’s new environment until it resonates with the crowd that participated in it’s current form.  Now, the message is the product of many contributors, all with a stake in it’s success.

This now takes the old model of message crafting, publishing and calculating ROI; and changes it to crafting, publishing, stewarding through the new social media landscape, and calculating ROI.  And ROI also needs to be evaluated differently.  More resources are expended in the delivery, but there are real numbers of active participants at the target.

In conclusion, this social media has not made PR easier. It has changed the lifecycle of a message and extended its reach.  But no longer can you just put it out there. Social media messages are now  interactive and living and evolutionary.

Winemakers Make Things You Can Hold

I think back growing up in the 70’s.  My dad was true renaissance man in my eyes.  He was a mechanic, a plumber, an electrician, a rancher, a teacher, and a fireman.  He could fix anything.  He had a garage full of tools and he taught me to use them all.  Our trucks always had mud caked on them from our ranch where we grew grapes and citrus.  I learned to drive on a Ford 400 tractor and at the end of the day, after spending time doing things on the ranch, I was tired and slept like a log.

In high school, there was a shop classes, small engine repair, woodworking, classes in which you did things with your hands, got dirty, sore, maybe scraped or cut up up a bit.  But, you touched the things your worked on.  You could actually bring it home when you were done and say: “I made this.”

I was pretty good at math and science too.  Actually, electronics was my interest.  College courses at night during high school, professor recommendation to a prestigious university’s electronic engineering program.  Theory, logic, circuit design, physics; they were all very engaging and interesting.  Computer science, computer languages, design patterns, punch cards, then terminals, PCs and databases all followed.  It all makes sense to me and it is engaging.  That was my destined career path.  That was the future.  Computers were the future and you were either with it or not.

But something was missing.

I have a hard time explaining to my parents what I do.  They understand that I work with computers, and they have become quite computer literate themselves.  Necessity and interest has led them to become very proficient in e-mail, the web, spreadsheets, even digital imaging and video.  But working as a computer scientist is hard to explain.  I have nothing that I can carry into their home and say “I made this.”

I think about this when I am making wine.  Wine is a hobby for me.  It doesn’t pay the bills, not even close. But at the end of the day, I have a bottle, with a label, with my name on it.  I can take it with me to friends and\or family and say. “I made THIS.”

That is the appeal of a winemaking for me.  It fills a need to produce something tangible.  The end result is something I can hold, carry and give to friends and family.  It doesn’t require abstract descriptions of what I did to produce it.  It is real.  That is what winemaking is about for me.

I made this.

Sorry Will Akerlof, you're half wrong

This is a response to a blog posting I read on Online Media Daily. You can read the blog posting titled: Twits: Why Twitter Won't Change Marketing by a Will Akerlof

Before I go on, I do agree with Mr Akerlof that Twitter won't change the fundamentals of Marketing. Where I have a problem with his article, is the premise that it will have no effect at all and everyone will look back it as silly and deny we ever took it seriously.

I am a Twitter user. Sometimes I am a Twitter promoter. I wouldn't call myself a Twitter Zealot, but I do find myself compelled to defend the service from time to time. One thing I don't consider my self: a Twitter Evangelist.

Now, when I use the term Evangelist, it brings to mind a religious connotation, and that fits. There are "Born Again" Twitterers out there that would have you believe that Twitter is the second coming of The Net, or the "end all and be all" of this new field of marketing. But, don't let their extreme rhetoric distort the landscape

It is easy to get the impression that Twitter is populated by a few, distinct types of users. The popular press likes to represent new technologies that way. It makes it easy to fit it into a news story, or use it as background. Mr. Akerlof is a good example of the over-simplification of Twitter and its users. He presents a graphic showing that there are 3 types of users:

• People he doesn't care about
• People doing something interesting
• People who twitter

And his Venn diagram shows that the overlap of those people is a very small area. It is cute, easy to understand, and probably wrong. I can't speak for him and the little circles that he uses to classify people, but his system of determining the data behind this graph seems just a little bit shortsighted. Does he really believe that the Marketing, Business and Network populace falls neatly into these three groups? That should make finding your audience and reaching them a piece of cake! Lets not put users into your little boxes quite yet.

Twitter won't drastically change Marketing. Saying that it will is as short sighted as the Dot-Com pundits who were saying that all the rules of business had changed because of the Internet. We all learned that, No, the rules actually still apply. At the end of the day, you do needed to make a profit and all the sock puppets and WebVan trucks you advertize are not going to make up for loosing money, just because your stock price is inflated.

The rules of Marketing still apply. You need to get your brand out there, connect with your customers and make them feel comfortable with your product. If 72% didn't stick with Twitter, and you were uninterested in that other 28% of vocal users, fine, ignore them. I bet a year ago, that 28% was only 10%.

Now, although the internet did not change the basic rules of business, you can't argue that it has not affected businesses. I doubt you would start a company and say that you are going to ignore any internet facing access for your company and its employees. That web thing and blogging is a bunch of out of work guys in they pajamas working from their parents basements, right?

Twitter's place in marketing is the same. If you are depending on Twitter to be your entire marketing campaign, you're going to fail. Unless of course you are one of the 500,000 life coaches, or Social Media Guru's that seem to have appeared out of nowhere.

Data showing that many 72% of Twitter users loose interest and drop out, is not a compelling argument that it is a wasteland or black hole of marketing resource. It is a piece of the puzzle, a small but very interesting tool in the belt of a marketing professional. But don't try to give the impression that it will have no effect at all, unless you are just trying to get others that don't "get it" to comment and reinforce your opinion.

That sounds like an echo chamber too.

But, thanks for making me think about it

Why Does the Beverage Industry Seem to “Get” Social Marketing? Because It Always Has.

It makes sense.  Wine and food have always been about people sharing an activity with other people.  Wine and food is best experienced with friends.  Even when you’re with people you don’t know, wine and food seems to spark the conversation, lower the firewalls, provide the commonality for a shared experience that, many times, leads to discussion and friendships.

Families have been using the dinner table to re-connect with each other forever.  Sometimes, the supper at the dinner table is the only place or time we get to see the rest of our family.  A home base in our busy lives of work, school, and life.  The dining table was the original social network.

Friends and coworkers get together after work or on the weekends for a drink, time to relax, blow off steam, and catch up.  A glass of wine or beer lifted with friends makes up for all of those thankless interactions we all have during our day.  Whether going out or staying in, it allows us to catch up with our friends and find out how each other are doing.

Local pubs and watering holes were the original Facebook.  A place to reconnect with old friends, make new friends, share what was going on, laugh.  Not much different that the online version, only now your friends can be separated by more distances.  It feels comfortable surrounded by friend.  The the pub in Cheers, every knows your name.

I can imagine Norm from Cheers on Chat.  As soon as he logs on, all of his buddies sending him an IM at the same time that just say “NORM!”  Woody would IM him saying “What’s up Mr. Peterson?” and Norm would respond back with a witty one liner.  Of course, Cliff Clavin would be constantly sending out 140 character tweets of “Little Known Facts”, all taken from Wikipedia (Today’s Guinness Book).

The Beer and Wine community have always depended on relationships as their bread and butter.  Beer comes packaged to share will 5 friends.  A bottle of wine is the perfect size for 4 people; at least to start.  No one wants to drink alone, they want to do it with friends.  And, sharing it with friends builds memories.  Memories are what makes life enjoyable.  Online communities mimic this community.

There might be other factors that has helped the beverage industry in general, and the wine industry in particular to click with the technology based social media.  The proximity of California’s wine country to Silicon Valley has permitted a large cross pollination of resources and people to flow back and forth between high tech, net savvy people and wineries.  It is obvious that the social media connected wineries are heavily dominated by those close ties to Silicon Valley.  Napa and Sonoma is very well represented.

Another contributing factor is probably the economy.  The cost of entry to social networking is very low.  Although, to be successful, a business needs to invest quite a bit of time, fostering relationships and maintaining their online presence.  That is a hidden cost of Social Networking.  Where a business, in the past, may have taken out an add, or bought some airtime, Social Networking requires a social commitment.  These are not just customers, they are friends, followers and buddies.

Welcome to the world of Hospitality 2.0.

Mayfield Iconoclast series Nocturna – Good, but not a value

When I first heard of Mayfield Brewing company in Belmont, I was intrigued with the beer, the brewery history, and the brewer. The brewer is a microbiologist as well as a beer and wine enthusiast, and a businessman.

The brewery is a reincarnation of an 1868 brewery that started in the San Francisco community of Mayfield, are area now known as Palo Alto. The brewery was serving the local peninsula until it closed down due to prohibition.

The beer is a blend of old world and new world brewing. Brewed in a small, local brewery, the brewer began experimenting with beer that he aged in wood barrels acquired from wineries. The beer was conditioned in the barrel, allowing it to develop characters from the wines that previously occupied the barrels, the oak from the barrels and from micro-oxygenation like a wine.

Hearing about this, I followed the brewers web postings and twitter posts as he blogged about hand delivering to local stores. My first few attempts to find the beer were not successful. The store clerks were unaware of the beer, but eventually, talking with the brewer and the buyers at the store, I found it. But I was a bit surprised at the price.

The beer comes in 750 ml bottles, and it is a small batch, completely hand crafted, hand bottled, hand labeled and hand delivered by the brewer. So I was expecting that it would not be an inexpensive beer. And I was correct. When I spoke with the buyer at the store, I asked how much it was and he said simply that it was $42.50. “Wow!” I thought. “That is a bit steep.” I pressed the buyer further. “Is that for a 4 pack?” “No”, he informed me. “That is for a bottle.” HOLY COW!

Now, $42 is a lot for many wines. A wine for $42, although not out of the questions, needs to be real special. You can get a wonderful, quality wine for that. But there are very few beers that rise to that price. There are a few notable exceptions, but they are all from well know breweries and have a track record for excellence. This beer is an unknown.

I decided that I was going to hold off for a while. Possibly I would be able to get a few other enthusiasts to gather with enough interest to get one that we could taste together. I had expressed my interest in the beer to my wife and, being the wonderful, supporting and enabling woman that she is, she surprised me with a bottle one day.

So, on Mothers Day, we opened it.

The Bottle is beautiful. It is a traditional 750 ml Champagne bottle. It is sealed with a cork and a crown cap, like many French and Belgian beers. The neck was dipped wax. Not a brittle was, but a soft, black paraffin. Clearly, the beer was packaged to be laid down for a while. From the neck of the bottle also hung a card on string which gave information about the beer and it’s aging to this point. It noted that the beer was a 2007 vintage, and had aged for over 10 months in an oak barrel previously used for a petit syrah port from Napa Valley.

The presentation was very nice. I was hoping that the contents would live up to the run up.

We poured the beer into wide mouthed wine glasses, to give the aroma as much of an opportunity as possible to present.

The color was a deep, dark stout black with a ruby color only visible in the sun. The carbonation was obvious, but not over carbonated. And the nice, creamy head consisted of fine bubbles. I would say the appearance in the glass was a perfect imperial stout pour.

There was almost no perceptible aromatic hop characters. As the beer warmed, it began letting some of the wood notes come out. I detected some of the oak, others did not notice that, but vanilla became noticeable and molasses and caramel characters from the malt started to come to the front.

The beer was well balanced between the sweetness and the bitterness, in fact, I thought it was very good. I felt that it could have had a bit more hop character. The time in the barrel may have diminished the aromatics of the hops. I don’t expect an imperial stout to have a lot of hop floral character, but this had none. It may have been the brewer’s intent to have the barrel character be a substitute for the aromatic hops, and to a degree, that worked.

But, that is when I realized the flaw in the beer. Yes, it was excellent, but so are many, many other beers available on the market. I enjoyed this beer, but there is no way that I would say that it was worth $42 dollars for 750 ml and my current gold standard imperial stout, from Dogfish Head, is 1/6th the cost.

Now, I know that Mayfield is not getting rich on this beer, even at that price. I can only imagine that at what I believe his production costs and quantities are, he is probably loosing money on it at this stage, or at the very best breaking even. So, I can not completely fault him for the pricing. But at the same time, I just can’t see this moving at the price point. I hope that Mayfield brewing can bring up the quantities or lower their fixed costs and overhead to bring the price down. Until then, I don’t expect that I will be have them again.

Critical mass, Fermi Pile, pent up resources, and a turn in the economy

I am not an economist. I don’t claim to be able to predict what this quarters GDP, earnings reports, unemployment figures or durable goods sales are going to be. I don’t know if the economy is going to turn around in one month or 10 months. But I think I can say with some certainty, it has been bad (real bad) and all previous history seems to indicate that it will get better again.

I have a lot of friends, family and previous co-workers that are either unemployed or under-employed. I know even more people who, even if they are not happy with what they do for a living now, there is no way that they would risk leaving it to try something new.

All of this talent is waiting, like the legs of a swimmer on the starting blocks. This talent is just waiting for the starter’s gun to go off. The energy, collectively stored in this reservoir of talent is almost unimaginable, ready to explode as soon as the shot is fired.

There is another storehouse of resources growing at the same time: Social media and social networks. This collection of simple little services such as Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, and Web 2.0 communities have been growing, gaining followers, working out the bugs, getting past the novelty and probably most important, adding users.

The downturn in the economy may have enabled and even fed these social networks. Millions of users have a bit more time on their hands, not as much free cash to go out, and a need to connect with friends. Oprah alone may have taken Twitter over the top when she featured it on her show. Twitter went from being this obscure service that almost no one used or understood to this misunderstood service that almost everyone was talking about, but still didn’t completely understand.

In the hay day of the Internet explosion (before it was known as the DotCom Boom), the power of a system came from the design of the system itself. Webservers, mail servers, databases; they all were judged against each other by their speed, their storage, their throughput, and their feature set. And although those metrics are still important, the users don’t care. Who cares if you can send only 140 characters at a time, if you are doing it any from device, at any time, from anyplace. Who cares if it takes 30 to 60 seconds for a tweet to get to its followers if they are splitting their time between their MP3 player and the other 5 things they are doing at the same time.

The power of the social network doesn’t come from the software. It comes from the users and the chaotic flow of information between them. It is no longer the software that is valuable; it is the shear quantity of users that make the system valuable.

Just like nuclear fuel is not explosive in small quantities or diluted form. A lump of unrefined uranium will not start a self sustained nuclear reaction because the molecules of fissionable material are too far apart, and not concentrated enough to have the neutrons that are flying off of them collide and interact with the other fissionable molecules. In 1942, Enrico Fermi and his fellow scientists were able concentrate uranium and bring it close enough in proximity to enable the first self-sustained nuclear reaction. As soon as it reached critical mass, the system was self sustaining and able to keep itself going.

Social networks have now reached that point. They have amassed enough users that they have momentum. It is harder for someone to dismiss them as a fad or an oddity. And at this point, businesses either needs to get with it, or get out of the way.

Some businesses and government agencies were slow to move onto the web, not understanding how it applied to them. Other businesses fumbled with the early web, awkward domain names, unwieldy URLs and confusing, awkward or just unusable web sites. But those early adopters figured it out. They realized that the internet was not only required for their business to succeed, but there were businesses that succeeded only on the Internet.

Social networks and social mediums and the foundation for the next wave of business/customer relationships. Business has always been about relationships and now those interactions have just found a new mechanism to expose them.

Paid to blog about wine you say? Yes!

Don't expect to give up you day job. But lately, there seems to be more reports and articles about getting paid for blogging about wine than reports about the job market coming back.

Who would have thought that wine blogging would become a leading indicator of the economy turn around? But it makes sense. When times are tough, you tend to recall your passions. That passion might be wine. Or, wine might be the muse that brings that passion to the surface.

In any case, here are some opportunities for a mash up between wine and social media.

Tell them you heard it hear first!

• 6 Month Dream Job
• $1,000 Wine Blogger Scholarship
  

Social Media and the Large Company

It is reminiscent of seeing football player and ballet classes. Awkward, scared, stumbling and falling. Unsure of their step. It is all so foreign, all so new, and all so weird.

Twitter seemed to reach critical mass about a few months ago. Can you pick the date when it happened? I think I can. January 15, 2009. Sure, there were a few of us using it, talking about it, being ridiculed about it. But then all of a sudden, it all seemed to change. On January 15, Janis Krums, (Twitter Bio: Entrepreneur, Former Athlete, The Miracle on the Hudson Photo Guy, Latvian, Co-Founder of Elementz Nutrition, Social Media Enthusiast) was on a ferry heading across the Hudson river and a plane went down.

U.S. Airways flight 1549 hit a flock of birds on take off and after suffering complete engine failure was forced to make a miracle landing in the Hudson River. News reports would have picked it up sooner or later and sent their crews out. But Janis Krum happened to be on a ferry in the area, and a Twitterer, and a subscriber of a sibling service called Twitpic that let him take a photo from his IPhone and upload it to his twitter account.

At that moment, all the rules changed. It was almost as if Gutenberg had just reinvented the printing press and movable type. All of a sudden, the popular media realized that there may be something to this connected world. Maybe it was the swoosh sound of popular media getting bigger that got their attention. Or, maybe it was the creaking sound of their part of if getting a little bit smaller. In any case, the genie was out of the bottle and there was no putting it back.

Just like when Sir Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the idea of networked documents, connected by links, accessible across this academic network, become known as the World Wide Web, now just the “Web”. People had no idea the impact. How could such an obscure idea move beyond its initial audience? I doubt he could have foreseen that within 10 years, children in grade schools would see “the Web” as synonymous with the internet.

Well, we are there again. This little, obscure protocol, web interface, internet based idea, has caught the attention of the popular media. And, as before, they have no idea what to make of it. I sometimes laugh at how they talk about Twitter. I hear on the news, references to “This new phenomenon called Twitter”. Or, “this activity called a Tweet”. And, now that it is something exciting and maybe even cutting edge, the Hollywood names are catching on. One huge celebrity, who had a disturbed fan following her on Twitter, that sent a disparate message indicating suicidal thoughts, responded with a tweet of her own about it. That sparked a firestorm of interest that resulted in a community tracking this desperate individual down and possibly saving her life.

Twitter has become the new “Thing” For better or worse. It is there.

Now, businesses are trying to figure it out. Is Twitter an advertising medium? A communication platform? An alternative to Email, Web? Mailings? What is it? How can I use it to my advantage? Big companies seem to have no clue. But then again, Big corporations rarely have mixed well with community anything. Unless of course they own the community.

But large corporations can see this untapped medium out there and are wanting to take advantage of it. They will, and they will probably be very successful at it. But right now it is the magical time for the small business to stake their claim in Social Media. Small business have always been the domain of social media. The local restaurant, reaching out to its neighbors in the local rag. The corner drycleaner with a flyer up at the downtown drugstore. That is what social media used to be. And, the electronic version is not so different.

The basis of Social media, whether it is Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or the like, is the concept of Community. People of like interest enjoy interacting with others of similar interests.

You see? It isn’t that different. Community is the key. If businesses keep focused on their community, whether that means down the street, their friends on Facebook or their followers on Twitter, they can use that media successfully.

The only thing that works in your community is honesty. You can’t deceive or take advantage of one part of your community and hope that the rest won’t know about it. The new Social media takes this to the next level. A business can’t successfully try to game the system. Information travels at the speed of the net now. Since the invention of the telegraph, you have not been able to outrun your actions. Now, with the internet and Web 2.0, your business has to be accountable in real time. If you accept that, you will succeed. If you try to beat it, you will loose.

Beer Wars Movie – I am trying to get upset, but I can’t

David vs. Goliath. That was the billing. Who was the evil villain in this film? Was is Big Beer, as exemplified by Anheuser Busch? Was it the beer distributors themselves, or the whole schizophrenic American 3 tier system?

I got back from watching Beer Wars. I thought it was a great documentary about the craft beer movement in the US and the mammoth commercial giants that pretty much own the US market, and of course, the post prohibition 3 tier alcohol distribution system. I am looking forward to buying the DVD when it comes out. I am not sure if I will watch it beginning to end again, but I might like to go back and revisit some places again. And, I expect I would like to share it with friends.

I am unsure of what to take away from the movie. Am I supposed to be upset with the state a beverage industry, or a supposed oppression of the craft brewers, or a racketeering-like beverage distribution monopoly imposed 60 years ago? But here’s the thing: try as I might, I just can’t get upset about it. Maybe that’s fine. That may be a sign of a good documentary. The producers just presented the facts, and let the audience decide who the good guys and bad guys are, if any.

The owners of the beer distributor, although seeming a bit (How do I say this?) Mafia-esk. Not that they are, or if they are, that there is any problems with that. I mean no disrespect at all. As the panel discussion’s moderator said: “I don’t want to wake up tomorrow morning with a horse head in my bed”. The distributors do provide a service. Without them, many small breweries may get no exposure at all. The movie does show how there seems to be a overwhelming presence, and therefore bias towards the large megabreweries. And it was implied, and somewhat shown, the possible illegal influence that these breweries have on the distributors, to the detriment of the small craft brewers.

I wanted to feel sorry for the little guys, and angry at the big players. I could empathize with the craft brewers. They are working their buts off, against terrible odds, mortgaging their family’s home, college education, and retirement. Struggling against huge odds and putting in long, 20 hr days, 7 days a week, with a high likelihood of failure. But three things keep me from being angry at the suggested injustice.

1. These people are doing what they love, following a dream, much of the time not willing to trade it for anything, willing to risk everything to make it happen and truly passionate about what they are doing and have accomplished despite the odds. In many ways, I found myself envious of what they are doing and their bravery.

2. The large brewery conglomerates were once just like these craft guys. Small, mom and pop breweries. Many of them were penniless immigrants, looking to fulfill their dream, maybe even the overused term: “The American Dream”. They risked their families’ money to pursue this. And you can’t argue that they are not giving the American public what they want, even if they spend millions convincing the public of that. They suffered through prohibition and those that emerged were the ones that did it best.

3. And finally, when they asked the craft brewers on the panel, what type of growth have they seen over the last couple years in their own business. Both responded that they have seen a phenomenal growth. Stone Brewery mentioned that he as seen a 45% growth year over year. And Dogfish Head seemed like they couldn’t get the newer, larger tanks in fast enough, as they were lowering them in via crane from the roof of they huge new facility.

So, no, I did not come out of the movie with my dislike for the big breweries, or the distributors that I thought I would. What was confirmed was that I truly love craft brews, their community, their culture and even the industry. Would I consider taking the leap and doing it myself? Sometimes I think I would. , Most of the time I am perfectly content letting them do the work as I reap the benefit of their labor and enjoy my little brewery/winery/garage.

Thanks to the producer / director / writer/ financier powerhouse independent filmmaker of Beer Wars: Anat Baron. You did make a very informative, entertaining, enjoyable and thought provoking documentary. I hope that it was an overall positive experience for you. I know it was a labor of love and I look forward to seeing other projects from you in the future.

This blog post was not intended to be a review of the movie, just my observations and reactions to it. But I would like to briefly mention things I liked and did not like about it.

Likes:
I liked seeing the lives and families of the craft brewers. Hearing in their own words and styles what brought them here and their expectations and experiences.

I liked being exposed to the dynamics of the industry, seeing first hand the long hours, back breaking labor and disappointments.

I like seeing the different aspects of the industry, including the craft brewers and brand marketers like the sole force behind Moonshot, Rhonda Kallman. I hope she does well, but I am afraid I would never buy a beer that has caffeine as an additive. I don’t believe in adding something to a beer just to make it appeal to a market but doesn’t actually improve it at all.

I liked seeing the representation of women in the industry. I would be interested if this accurately represents the percentage of women to men brewers. It may only be me, but women and beer just go together. Or at least they are two of my favorite things.

I loved seeing Charlie Papazian. I forget how much I enjoy him. He is such a great, smart, knowledgeable and energetic spokesperson for the craft and home brew community. I wish that he would have been given more time during the panel discussion. His comments were always the most informative, fact based and interesting to me.

Dislikes:
I wish the movie would have talked more about the 3 tier system of distribution. It was touch on but I could have used more background, history, insight. You see, I am sure that I really should be angry at them. Help me there, please.

I would have like to see more about the histories of the big brewers, not just their activities once they were powerhouses. Some perspectives about when they were small craft brewers and maybe see some of their passions.

I thought that the pre-recorded comments from Todd Alsrom was distasteful. Having him talking about his distain of Moonshot beer, saying that it was a misspelling calling it Craft, and instead should replace the “FT” in Craft with a “P”. While that was entertaining, and a perfectly sound opinion, I though it was rude, contrived and a bit lazy faux conflict to show that during the panel discussion. Mainly, because Todd was part of the panel as well as the Rhonda Kallman of Moonshot. If he would be willing to say that to her face, during the discussion, great. But in this format, it was obviously there to embarrass one, the other, or both. Todd, if you were happy with the way that was handled, I have lost a little respect for you. And Rhonda, if for no other reason than that cheap shot, I hope you the best finding your niche.

Finally, I really disliked Ben Stein. I am not saying I dislike Ben Stein (“Bueller, Bueller, Bueller”). I generally disagree with his views, but he seemed to keep them in check during his moderation of the panel discussion. Sometimes I could hear his conservative views coloring his remarks or leading questions, but mostly he was straight down the moderation trough. But he obviously did not add any benefit to the movie, and seemed a bit fumbling. It might have been fun to have two moderators, then Ben could have been one, and a more cottage industry sympathetic moderator could have been there for balance.

Overall: Congratulations Anat. Great job, Great movie. Good luck.

Tim