Most of the world’s social media accounts associated with businesses are just gripe-fests – just look at the tweets for any national airline and you will see a long list of whiny bullshit, terrible attempts at being cool (@brandssayingbae isn’t tweeting lately, but holy moley they were good at making fun of terrible attempts at relevancy by corporations), or lazy/boring. In the beer world, there are a lot of terrible beer social media accounts (let’s acknowledge that there are still sexist/mysogynist brewery marketing for just a second, but ignore them for now), but there are infinitely more excellent social media presences, especially independent folks who just love/hate beer.
For the most part, beer photography/social media has a kind of three-pronged approach to success: pictures of foamy, beery awesomeness, shiny stainless steel metal stuff, and people with beards and tattoos. Oh, and puns. There are a lot of puns. For some god-awful reason, beer social media artists love puns. Bonus points for oaken barrels, hop cones, brewers sifting through grain, and classy pin-up style brewery girls. If you want to work as a social media person for a beer company, that’s all you need to know: foam, metal, puns, wood, beards and tattoos. Seriously, put that in your résumé, use me as a reference.
Getting away from those clichés is hard, so that’s why I suggest @Ipas_suck on Instagram. It’s one of my favorite new people to follow. Layered with copious amounts of cuss words and metal as [E-F-F], @Ipas_suck is hilarious for anyone working in the brewing industry that is completely tired of brewing beer with more than a handful of hops (I’m reminded of Carver’s head brewer, Patrick Jose’s words to me on my first day of work at Ska: Modus, Modus, Modus, always [effing] Modus)
In a review of The Dudes’ Brewing Co.’s California IPA:
“It tastes like getting butt [effed] dry in the redwood forest by a [effing] giant cedar tree. California: shit state, shit beer, shit traffic, [eff] eeeeverything west coast.”
In a positive(?) review of Idletyme Brewing:
If you’re a hophead and you want to try something that isn’t incredibly ‘cool’ because it’s fermented in lamb skin condoms, check out Idletyme Brewing Company.
On a totally different and family friendly tack, Otter the brewery cat (@otterthebrewerycat) is a cat that lives in a brewery (formerly, Former Future Brewing; currently Black Project Wild and Spontaneous Ales). This is like an internet/beer social media wet dream: a cat that’s surrounded by shiny metal and barrels. That’s it. Just a cat, shiny metal, and barrels. Done. It’s not really an inside scoop to the goings on of the brewery. It’s not a way to connect to avid fans trying to get the lowdown on new bottle releases. It’s a cat for beer’s sake, and it’s pretty glorious.
@Louiebaton is a beer review Instagram that poses the beers with custom Lego creations. The reviews are pretty clever and funny and the beer being reviewed is pretty diverse and the pictures are fairly entertaining, but how many pictures of Lego guys can really be that great? All of them I guess.
@brewtographyproject is the cream of the crop of the foamy/shiny metal/brewery folk (fortunately, there are no puns). They started as a photography project on Kickstarter that was going to make a photography book of the breweries of Colorado and it’s morphed into a full-on business, doing product and marketing photography for breweries. If you are one to love shiny metal, foamy beers, oaken barrels, weird looking beer folk, Brewtography Project is the best.
Robert Alan Wendeborn is a former cellar operator at Ska Brewing and current lead cellar operator at Tin Roof Brewing in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
