Beer, and, society. Or, I’m glad someone else understands Twitter better than me.

Sorry it’s been a while since the last post.  If you read our first post, you’d know we didn’t plan on writing regular posts…

You’d also know that the guys starting this company are operations guys.  We can brew the beer and run the plant.  We can buy the malt and the hops, and keep watch over our yeast.  We can manage our fermenter capacity and our finished goods inventory.

But we don’t know jack about marketing.

One thing I have said for a long time to colleagues (in some way, shape or form) is: “I have no idea what people like.”  This pertains to a wide variety of my interests – food, music, physical activity (I like running… I know other people do this, but there are many more people who think this is simply an insane way to spend your time.) 

We do know that people like beer.  A lot.  But what’s the best way to get the message out about what we’re trying to do?  We think we’ve done a decent job so far – you know, for not really owning an actual business yet.  We’ve had our name in the Great Lakes Brewing News, Buffalo Rising, and the Buffalo Spree.  And you’re reading this, aren’t you?

I have to give it up to social media.  The series of events which helped to get our name out there is pretty cool I think.  We had a tasting at Alternative Brews a while back.  At that tasting was someone in the catering industry that hadn’t heard of us before.  We got talking with her a bit (she loved our Vanilla Oatmeal Stout) and she invited us into a Facebook group – “Buffalo Beer Geeks” – which was a group we feel like we naturally fit right into.  We had a meeting at Pizza Plant one night, and one of the owners let others in the FB group know that we’d be there with some beer.  That set off another chain of events of people asking about us, including Buffalo Rising, who wrote an article about us.  And that opened us up to even more inquiries – including from the people that now stand to become our investors.

At Alternative Brews - picture courtesy of Ess

Does this sort of thing happen all the time?  My guess is… probably.  But that doesn’t make it any less amazing. 

Despite all of this - there’s still a lot we don’t know about marketing.  This is definitely not my strong suit.  I’ll read and re-read this post dozens of times before it goes up, asking myself questions like “Is this funny or just plain stupid?  Does this offend anyone?  Blah-bla-bla-blah”.  Which is why it takes us a while to actually post anything. 

Because of that, I’m really happy to announce that we’ve added a few folks to our team who will be helping us with this stuff.  Steve and Matt know social media, they know branding, they know sales, and – of course – they love Buffalo, and they love beer.  This ultimately means you’ll be getting our message in much cooler ways than ever before.  Stay tuned.  Or better yet, please, please, please Like us.