TWO BROTHERS, BRASS BALLS

January 27, 2012

Twirly...

Two Brothers Brewing in Warrenville, Illinois, is geographically the closest “major” production brewery to my suburban Chicago hometown, so when they announce big news, I’m always quite excited for them. Throw in the fact that the brewery’s founding brothers Jim and Jason Ebel share my alma mater, and you get a brewery that I’ve tried to support whenever possible ever since I first got into craft beer. This has included a number of trips to the brewery-adjoining tap house and special events like the yearly release of their DIPA “Hop Juice.”

I was excited, then, to see the brewery announce via its Facebook page* Tuesday afternoon that it would officially begin releasing canned brews. And surprisingly, it’s not even one of their year-round brews or a flagship beer like Domaine DuPage that they’re releasing! Instead, it’s an entirely new beer called Outlaw IPA. It’s something quite unexpected from a brewery that already makes a few different IPAs, but indicative of Two Brothers’ obvious confidence in their product and in their fans.

*The brewery mostly uses its Facebook page for all news, because its site is horrifically out of date, as I have pointed out at length before. Read the rest of this entry »

2 Comments | Ale Factories | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Kid Carboy Jr.

TEN OF THE WORST BREWERY WEBSITES

December 22, 2011

If this is on your brewery website in December of 2011, that's a bad sign.

This post is going to piss people off.

I’m aware of this even as I begin writing, because I know that at least some of the folks who read it are going to be unable to disassociate my condemnation of a brewery’s website from condemnation of the brewery itself. To those people, I can only shrug in a semi-defeated, exasperated sort of way, and suggest that maybe you’re missing the point.

As I covered in the preceding post on what makes a “good” brewery website, I personally believe an ale factory’s web presence is its single most important public face, particularly if it’s a brewery serving a larger area than just one city or community. Small brewpubs can more easily afford to have a bad web presence if they’re able to connect with their target customers on a face-to-face basis, but if you’re trying to reach people the next state over who aren’t likely to be visiting anytime soon, your website, as a business, is going to be the first place a curious person will search for information. In 2011, this is a fact.

It’s shocking, then, how many brewery websites straight-up fail to give any of the necessary information that a business site should offer—like a list of the beers you make, for instance. Others contain other sorts of failings, from being straight-up annoying or ugly as sin* to being frightfully out of date. Many breweries these days have turned to social media to make up for these failings, participating actively on their Facebook or Twitter accounts and posting news updates there. This is a step in the right direction and a good thing overall, but it still doesn’t make up for a website that fails otherwise. Ideally, a brewery is able to embrace all aspects of its web presence, but at the very least it needs to offer the kinds of basic information I defined in my last post. Customers should leave your site having found exactly what they were looking for—anything less can be improved upon.

*Even to someone with absolutely no design experience whatsoever, like me. Read the rest of this entry »

28 Comments | A Series of Tubes, Ale Factories, Beer Marketing, Best/Worst | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Kid Carboy Jr.

TWO BROTHERS REPRIEVE SCHWARZBIER

July 30, 2011

I really enjoy schwarzbiers, but they’re definitely not a style you see all that often, even in this age of increasing craft beer enlightenment. I imagine that’s because they’re kind of a relic and caught stylistically inbetween a bunch of other places–a dark beer that is also crisp, not as powerfully flavored as your porters and stouts. It’s easy to see how a lot of drinkers getting into craft beer might go straight for bigger and badder dark beers, but there’s a certain schwarzbier quality I like very much.

The best ones combine the aspects of a continental European pilsner and a drier, roastier version of a Vienna lager. There should be fairly low sweetness, a dry, roasty character and a good charge of noble hops. I like some spiciness in them, like you would get in a Czech pils. Unfortunately, that’s not quite what I got from this particular schwarzbier. Read the rest of this entry »

6 Comments | Tasting Notes | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Kid Carboy Jr.

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