Cheer up, Beer Twitter

Nov 17, 2019

Monthly update for November 2019

The difficulty of distinctiveness
The apparent misery of 'Beer Twitter'
What goes viral and what doesn't?
Signed books for Christmas
Fun stuff: Cheers, Flaming Moe's, baffling Bass

Distinctiveness don't come easy

Prompted by Chris Hall’s recent blog post and the more general conversation it echoes, we’ve been thinking about why so many craft breweries might end up reaching for high concept (or silliness, if you’re a cynic) in search of something to help them stand out.

There are several good reasons, including those mentioned by Chris:

High concept beers and big ones get more attention and generate short-term hype.
At least some brewers, we assume, enjoy coming up with these ideas.

But we think there’s also this: being distinctive otherwise is difficult when you’re using the same commercial yeast strains, same handful of popular hop varieties and same basic brewing methods as everyone else.

When we think of breweries whose beers we reckon we could identify blind, it’s Harvey’s and Fuller’s primarily. That’s partly down to familiarity but also because they’ve cultivated, or at least embraced, quirky yeasts which really do make themselves known.

In terms of modern brewers, it’s those like the pioneers we wrote about in the final section of Brew Britannia half a decade ago who stand out. Back then, we singled out the Wild Beer Co (wild yeast, wine and cider hybrids) and Moor (hazy beer) as truly distinctive.

But with more brewers, finding a niche becomes difficult.

In Bristol, we really struggle to tell the standard hoppy beers from each brewery apart from one another – even Moor which used to seem a world apart. But a decade ago, any one of them would have seemed remarkable and interesting.

We don’t think it’s likely but what we’d love to see is more breweries setting themselves apart with by being the only outfit producing style X, or the only one in the region blending with aged beer, or harnessing Brettanomyces, and so on.

What's wrong with Beer Twitter?

We struggle with the idea put forward by some that ‘Beer Twitter’ is ‘a garbage fire’.

Twitter in general can be frustrating, of course, but the conversation around beer is so much better now for us than it was a few years ago when the volume of trolls and bullies felt overwhelming at times.

But this is a genuine request: if you think Beer Twitter is particularly terrible, if it really gets you down, can you drop us a line to explain why? Maybe there’s something we’re missing, and maybe there's something we could do to help.

In the meantime, our suggestion is that people should resist the urge to popcorn.gif, Retweet or pile in on every bit of aggro or anger and instead make a point of Retweeting what they’d like to see more of.

We’re not sure what holds people back from RTing these days – perhaps there’s a sense that only the absolute tip-toppermost killer content deserves it? That the integrity of one’s curated timeline must be preserved?

Well, we reckon that’s rubbish, which is why we’ll quite often just RT a picture of an interesting looking pint or pub, or historical nuggets, or pop cultural bits relating to beer.

Because that's what we like to see.

Mildly interesting, with the emphasis on mild, is good.

Burgess Meredith explains the English pub, 1943.

Not going viral

Related to the above: last week, a film about pubs went viral on Twitter. It’s from World War II and features Burgess ‘The Penguin’ Meredith explaining to US troops how British pubs work.

It’s a great film – it very much deserves to be seen by as many people as possible – but here’s the question: why did it go viral when that bloke shared it but not when we did in 2017?

We mean, who cares, it doesn’t matter (though it would have been handy when we were trying to promote 20th Century Pub) but it is interesting to us. As if there’s a code here that might be crackable.

Step one, we reckon, is to put the video in a Tweet, not a blog post. Or, at least, do both.

Step two is a bit harder: have 40,000 followers.

We’ll have to keep working on that.

Signed books for Christmas

Yes, it’s time again for us to remind you that if you want to get a friend or relative one or more of our books for Christmas, we can arrange a signed copy.

Brew Britannia | £10 inc. P&P
20th Century Pub | £15 inc. P&P
Pierre van Klomp Says “No.” | £3 inc. P&P
All three | £25

Email us via contact@boakandbailey.com to sort out payment and postage details.

Because Balmy Nectar is an Amazon eBook and print-on-demand product, we can’t do signed copies, but if you happen to bring a copy to The Drapers Arms between now and Christmas we’d be happy to write something in it for you.

Links, videos and other bite-sized bits

1. We’ve been watching the 1980s US sitcom Cheers for the first time in… 30 years, maybe? And it’s fantastic. Much cleverer than we remembered. And the lyrics to the theme tune, performed by Gary Portnoy, really start to make sense when you reach middle age: “Making your way in the world today/ Takes everything you’ve got…” The portrayal of pub life is, of course, idealised but none the worse for that. So, yeah, that’s our hot take: a universally loved sitcom from 40 years ago is, indeed, good.