It might seem like craft beer has taken over the world in recent years, especially in hip cities like Portland, Oregon and Brooklyn, New York, but the craft beer movement has been growing steadily since the late 1970s when the Prohibition-era ban on home brewing was finally lifted.
Since the end of Prohibition in the 1930s, the taste in American beer had changed from its original roots. The industry had moved toward light beers made with corn and rice instead of the traditional malt-based varieties, and people who loved the taste of traditional beers turned to home brewing in order to satisfy their taste buds. During this period of time, the emphasis was on building a community and creating innovative beers grounded in a traditional foundation.
One of the reasons it feels like craft beer is a movement that came more recently than the late 70s is because in the early 2000s, more craft brewers began to move toward a business-minded model of brewing, which brought an underground movement to the attention of the public. With a strong community of beer advocates that had gathered and grown over the previous 20 years, brewers began to consider how they could compete with the mega breweries while continuing to produce beer that stood up to their high standards of quality.
In many ways, it seems that the stars aligned to launch craft beer into the next stratosphere.
People had begun to focus on the "green movement" of living more conscientiously to protect the environment. Part of that movement involves purchasing products locally rather than buying products that need to be shipped or trucked in using greenhouse-damaging fuel. This was perfect for craft brewers who were producing only enough beer to distribute regionally.
A few years into the new millennium, social media began to lay the foundation that gave businesses big and small the opportunity to spread their messages around the globe. Because of the cost-effective nature of social media marketing, craft brewers became early adopters of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other social networks where they could talk to beer lovers about what set their brews apart from the pack.
In 2011, Dogfish Head Brewery had already built a huge social media following by consistently interacting with their audience in a friendly and approachable manner. Early that year, a peculiar tweet from the Red Cross graced the screen of their social media coordinator. It read, "Ryan found two more four packs of Dogfish Head's Midas Touch beer. When we drink, we do it right...#gettingslizzered."
It turned out to be a gaffe on the part of a Red Cross employee who had forgotten to switch from the corporate account to her personal one. The tweet was deleted and replaced with a good humored acknowledgement of the hiccup: "We've deleted the rogue tweet but rest assured the Red Cross is sober and we've confiscated the keys."
Dogfish Head fans and the brewery itself quickly adopted the hashtag #gettingslizzered to encourage others to donate blood to the Red Cross. The campaign quickly picked up steam, and soon bars and brewpubs in over 30 states were offering a pint of Dogfish Head beer to donors who gave a pint of blood.
By turning a cringeworthy situation into an opportunity to do good, Dogfish Head not only demonstrated good humor, they won a slew of new fans and the story was picked up by nearly every major news outlet. For the price of a few tweets, Dogfish Head bought themselves millions of dollars worth of free publicity.
While the tale of the Dogfish Head tweet highlights a single instance that generated a lot of buzz, most times it's the long term campaigns that do the hard work of gaining new fans. But "long term" doesn't connote drudgery; in fact, some craft breweries have figured out a way to hand much of the content creation that goes into their social media campaigns to their current fans. This is the case with New Belgium's Clips of Faith tour.
The Clips of Faith tour is a play on New Belgium's Lips of Faith beer series, and the brewery asks fans to submit short films to be played during beer tastings around the country. The fan-generated films feature New Belgium's beers in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, but more importantly, they're fun, shareable content that conjures the kind of handcrafted, laid back atmosphere that New Belgium hopes reminds people of their beers.
New Belgium also harnesses the power of social media by bringing attention to local events via the brewery's own "beer ranger" whose job it is to direct people to area-specific New Belgium Facebook pages, where fans can meet, discuss upcoming events, and talk about their favorite beers.
So even though craft brewing isn't new, the explosion of craft brewing at the beginning of the 21st Century was really the result of a perfect storm of technology, a shift in attitudes, and the craft brewers' desire to play David to the mega brewers' Goliath.