How old is your brewery? Was it on MySpace?

Earlier this week Tom Acitelli wrote about when breweries started tweeting for All About Beer.

I’m certain that there is as book focused entirely on beer, breweries, brewers, and related hangers on as good as “Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet.” I hope somebody goes for it.

Thinking about it sent me digging through a few stories I wrote for New Brewer magazine, a trade publication for members of the Brewers Association. First, from 2009:

2007. Nobody talked about Twitter at the Craft Brewers Conference and it was lumped in with other social media such as YouTube and Second Life in a story in this space later in the year (full disclosure: I wrote that story.)

2008. A panel about using the Internet consisted of two distributors talking about tracking sales on the web and using it as a broadcast tool and Neal Stewart, then Prime Minister of Marketing for Flying Dog Ales, as the lone spokesman for social media. He wanted to document what he learned during the conference using Twitter, but the technology wasn’t in place and he had few followers in the craft beer business.

2009. What a difference at the CBC in Boston. Stone Brewing CEO Greg Koch tweeted during his keynote speech and later used Twitter to spread the word that the “I Am a Craft Brewer” video could be watched on the Internet. In providing an excellent how-to on “New Media and the Brewpub” Dan Browell and Mike Hiller included a Twitter primer. And during a panel discussion about “Beer on the Web” the panelists did a bit of tweeting. Additionally, many attendees tweeted throughout the conference, using hash tags so others could easily find their posts. At the beginning of 2009 perhaps 50 American breweries used Twitter. By July more than 200 breweries had Twitter accounts, far more than maintain active blogs.

Ah, 2007. Simpler times. New Belgium had a MySpace page, but it was run by a fan. Here’s the beginning of the New Brewer story I wrote that year:

Fred Bueltmann rightfully considers himself a now, aware kind of guy. The director of sales and marketing at New Holland Brewing, he still stands in with bands that play at the brewery’s pub, he’s tech savvy, he works in an industry that’s currently trendy . . . and his company even has a MySpace page.

The thing is Fred was a little surprised when he found out this last fact. Isaac Hartman, who works in sales for Bueltmann, created the space. Hartman is 26; Bueltmann is 38, and when Bueltmann looked at the carefully designed and focused New Holland web site and then at the anarchy that characterizes MySpace he didn’t feel quite as hip.

“I felt a little dated. I had to figure out how to register,” he said. “Certain forums are new to my generation. There’s another generation that’s doing things that surprise me. We’re being brought in rather than being on the cutting edge.”

Bueltmann had a decision to make. “There are some good reasons to roll it up and make it part of your company approach,” he said. “Your other instinct is, ‘Let’s go with it.’ You empower different parts of you team – this was his initiative.” New Holland “went with it” and in mid-June had more “friends” on MySpace than all but one other craft brewer, Flying Dog, which has made MySpace an integral part of its Internet marketing.

(At the time MySpace was the largest of the social networking websites – with somewhere between 50 million and 70 million different visitors in June, depending on which data tracking site you believed. New Holland Brewing had about 2,500 MySpace friends when the story was written. Now back to 2009: At the beginning of July Stone Brewing had 6,005 Twitter followers and 5,419 Facebook fans. All things are relative, given that Ashton Kutcher had 2.6 million fans at the time and Oprah Winfrey 1.8 million, but for comparison’s sake: Dogfish Head Brewery 6,529 Followers and 16,432 Facebook Fans; Flying Dog Brewery 7,294 and 4,293; and Magic Hat Brewing 7,539 and 13,546.)

Beer and social media should be a part of the next book about on the history of the industry. But a book that focuses only on Twitter could be a lot more fun.

So for the historians in the crowd, one quick point of order. Acitelli reports that Lagunitas started tweeting in 2014, but Tony Magee was there much earlier as LagunitasT.

You might recall he officially quit Twitter at one point, then came back. That’s part of the story.

And, in case you were wondering, my first tweet was not about beer, but did mention MySpace.

8 thoughts on “How old is your brewery? Was it on MySpace?”

    • Surely you mean 2006. Nice those blogspot posts are so easy to get to. Tracking website histories through the Wayback Machine is pretty hit and miss.

  3. Half of me wants to bang my head against the wall over this sort of thing being presented as history and half wants to check out my own Twitter feed for evidence. Magee was gold in Twitter back then: anti-PR geared to make you never want to buy his beer.

    • I’m not sure I understand. How social media has influenced beer sales, and consumer allegiance, seems worth tracking to me. But I don’t want to be the one doing the work.

  4. Sure it’s worth tracking but it’s a present phenomenon. Being aware that AAB has determined editorially that its readers are not interested in articles on brewing history, these sorts of sidetracks fill the conceptual space.

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