Anyone who knows me knows I have a passion for really good, really interesting, really off-the-beaten-path beer. The kind of stuff brewed with ingredients you’ve never heard of, aged in old wooden barrels, inoculated with strange bacteria (the harmless kind), and put in a dark cellar for a decade or so before consumed. That’s the good stuff, right there.

And I’ve been consuming that kind of beer – we call it “craft” beer, though there’s a lot of pretty pedestrian stuff that falls into that category for one reason or another – since I was, ahem, of legal drinking age. In fact, it used to be my job to write about it. (And if that job paid the bills, you can bet your sweet wort that I would have never set foot inside of an advertising agency.) I used to work in the basement of the second-highest rated liquor store in the world. I tasted beers that only a very minute percentage of the world’s population has ever tasted. It was one of the best professional experiences of my life.

And I am writing this with a completely straight face. I learned more about myself when I worked in the alcohol industry than I had at any point in my life. Here are some of the most important things:

Know who you aren’t

One of my fondest beer-related memories was sitting at The Dive Bar in Worcester, MA with a couple of my work friends, talking to the owner and then-bartender Alec Lopez, when a group of college-aged kids came walking in on a bar crawl. They looked at the beer menu – which is spectacular – for a moment before one of them stepped up and ordered a Coors Light. Alec turned his head and said simply, “We don’t serve that crap here.” The party left the bar in short order, and we went back to our beers. Our world was back in balance.

The lesson: Believe in something, and be steadfast in that belief. Don’t ever apologize for defying expectations in the pursuit of something better.

You are never the only one

It’s easy to think sometimes that you’re the only one who likes the work that you’re doing. Imagine being the first person to make a triple-IPA – a beer three times more bitter than the average IPA, which is itself the most aggressively-hopped beer style on the market. You’d have to seriously love hops to enjoy that kind of beer. The average beer drinker – even the average craft beer drinker – finds triple-IPAs unpalatable. So if you were the guy who first had the bright idea to brew one of these monsters, you’d be in some pretty sparse company. But people made these beers, and slowly, the hop-heads came out of the woodwork to consume them. Shortly thereafter, the craft beer scene saw an explosion in overly-hopped beers. And that first triple-IPA brewer was likely left scratching his head, wondering where all these like-minded hopheads came from.

The lesson: You’re never the only crazy one. Sometimes you just have to dig a little deeper to find the other crazies.

Accept competition, and embrace the undecided

Everyone in the world should go to a beer festival of some description at least once in their lives. It’s amazing. In a single room are gathered dozens of companies who are selling products that are remarkably similar – made on the same equipment from the same ingredients, all competing for the same small (but growing) slice of market share – and yet not a single one of those companies is thinking about stealing customers from another brand. Why? Because craft brewers understand what other industries are unable to express: that everyone in the room, vendors and consumers alike, are all there because they love beer. Plain and simple. They are united in their passion, and that spirit of unity has given life to one of the most amazing consumer communities that I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing.

The lesson: Your customers don’t see your competition as competition. You stand to gain absolutely nothing by trying to tear your competitors down.

You are what you like

People who like craft beer wear it like a favorite tee-shirt. They own their passion for good beer. You can see it when they order beers, when they pair beers with their meals, when they forego dessert in lieu of a good imperial stout – or when they order water when all that is available are beers that are described as the “coldest tasting” beer in the world. (Please pause to reflect on how stupid the phrase “coldest tasting” is, for a moment. I’ll wait.) Craft beer drinkers will proudly identify themselves as such when asked. And not, as I mentioned, loyal to any particular brand (though they have favorites) – just fans of good beer. It’s truly amazing.

The lesson: Create something that people love, and the people will become part of that thing. Your products and your community are inseparable. Your product is your community.

People care about the craft

Craft breweries are tourist destinations. Some breweries require you to make reservations before you visit to help stem overcrowding. People come in droves to see how their favorite beers are made, and are happy to meet the good people who take the time to stir the mash tuns with giant paddles, who pack the boxes and load the pallets, who pour the beers at the brewpubs. There is art in good craft beer, and people want to know more about it. If a tourist asks what the SRM on a particular beer is, not only will the tour guide be able to answer the question, but a good chunk of the people on the tour will know what the hell was being discussed. (For the uninitiated, SRM is a measure of the color of a beer.) Technical questions are embraced in the craft beer industry, and people who care about craft beer tend to care about the technical aspects of its creation, too. Amazing stuff.

The lesson: If you care about what you do, others will care about how you do it. Do not underestimate how deeply your biggest advocates care.

You can’t compete on price alone

The craft beer industry is successful because it stopped trying to be cheaper than Bud Light. Craft beer is made with more raw materials, and on a smaller scale, and on less efficient machinery. Craft brewers usually don’t own the barley, wheat or hop crops that they buy. They don’t have sophisticated national supply chain infrastructure. There’s no way they could possibly compete on price. Besides, have you ever had a beer that was cheaper than Bud Light? It’s utter swill, for the most part. So craft beer changed the game. They made their beers as affordable as they could, but they made it several orders of magnitude more flavorful than the gigantic macrobreweries did. You’ll pay more, but you’ll get more.

The lesson: There are two variables in the Value equation: the amount paid out, and the amount paid back. If you can’t be cheaper, be worlds better.

Life is too short to drink bad beer

That one’s kind of self-explanatory.

 

–MS