The Brewers Association's Guide to Starting Your Own Brewery by Dick Cantwell

Author:Dick Cantwell [Cantwell, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brewers Publications
Published: 2013-05-14T22:00:00+00:00

Guerrilla Marketing—Taking it to the Streets (or is it the Stage?)

Some words just sound good together. Nut Brown Ale. Honeymoon Suite. Free Bird Seed. Sometimes, in fact, they sound better than they are. Sometimes they are truly descriptive and exciting. Some are vague enough to be either, depending on what you make of them.

Guerrilla marketing is another such pair of words, sounding exciting and warlike in an on-the-ground kind of way. Stunts and pranks in place of ads that cost money often seem appropriate and emblematic of the Craft philosophy. Even when we can afford more, in fact, it’s often our style to downplay professionalism and make it all look like something we just threw together for the sake of hilarity. Shrewd marketing or merely dissembling? Often there’s little or no difference.

A good event centered on something unique about your brewery can attract attention, as well as the admiration of your peers. If it’s a success, you can bring it back for years to come. If it isn’t, well, you can always laugh about it later. Sometimes you can do both.

Even brewing a second style of pumpkin beer was a joke for us. With a small pilot system, you can brew pretty much whatever you want with virtually no stakes, and the great thing is that the mere existence of something is often more important than actually being able to get it. To brew an Imperial Pumpkin Ale seemed to me a hilarious departure, a chance to twit the seriousness of a venerable style—Imperial Stout—and the over-seriousness of the big IPAs that were beginning to lumber into vogue. But I didn’t hit my target gravity, and—joke or no joke—I couldn’t release a mid-weight beer and call it Imperial. Next time out I managed to make a monster, and not a bad one, either. That made three pumpkin beers; a few more and we could be even sillier. So I made a stout, a pilsner and a wheat beer, all with pumpkin, and we invited some of our local friends to join in, as well as ordering in some of the pumpkin beers available from out of town. We conditioned beer in a pumpkin. We threw a one-day festival, with pumpkin carving and pumpkin-themed food, and wondered if anyone would show. We had a line out the door for ten hours, and haven’t looked back.

Lots of breweries have their own events, often having begun with a single, definitive idea. It can center on a particular beer, or spring from a real, unheralded or downright imaginary holiday. Eccentric Day, foisted by Bell’s Beer on the citizens of Kalamazoo, is one of the latter; Dark Lord Day, held yearly, mainly in the parking lot of Three Floyds, in Munster, Indiana, is of the former, beer-centered variety. Tour de Fat, the traveling circus/environmental message/ promotional event put on extravagantly by New Belgium Brewing in several cities throughout the summer and fall is practically its own industry. You too can stake your claim.

Just because a

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