Social Media Sucks. What if Craft Breweries Left It Behind?
Everybody knows that Instagram is crucial to a craft brewery’s success. But what this column presupposes is… maybe it isn’t.
Hold that thought.
My first job out of college was at a publication called “Thrillist,” which kept painfully Millennial open-floorplan offices in the same converted Soho loft building as Foursquare. Foursquare was not a publication; it was a geospatial social media app that used your phone’s location to allow you to “check-in” at real physical locations to create what its co-founders loftily described as “a living, breathing map of the world.” I know this sounds unbelievable — and unbelievably corny — but it was the heady days of Web 2.0, so the app’s 30 million worldwide users mostly just did this for online clout. (Which was different from Klout, another app that endeavored to measure your clout online. Web 2.0 bay-bee!) But in addition to gamified status-chasing, Foursquare also offered some real-life perks to its users.
“In 2013, I used an app called Foursquare to check-in to a dive bar in Greenpoint every weekend via the geotargeting on my phone so I could get free tater tots,” recalled Ryan Broderick in a 2023 column at Garbage Day. “Everything on the internet is dumb and shameful until it’s not.”
Times change. Thrillist is now defunct, and the social-media portion of Fouresquare is, too. (Though, it still sells its geolocation services to other platforms.) The nature of social media — indeed, of internet culture itself — is shifting away from the platforms of Web 2.0. Facebook is a moribund chum-bucket of artificial intelligence-generated boomer ragebait. Twitter is X, a cesspool of right-wing propaganda that just this week had to unplug its house chatbot for providing graphic rape tutorials and repeatedly praising Hitler. Instagram is trying to be TikTok, which is cozying up to the Trump administration in hopes of maintaining access to the U.S. market. In a decade and a half of being professionally online, my own use of these platforms feels more personally fraught and less professionally rewarding than ever.
I’m not alone. Like so many other craft outfits, Dovetail Brewery established a presence on mainstream social media platforms when it first opened its doors midway through last decade. It made sense for the business. “People were just interacting with social media in a different way back in 2016,” says Jenny Pfäfflin, brewer and creative and marketing director, in a recent phone interview with Hop Take. She manages the brewery’s Instagram and Facebook presence, and used to do likewise for Twitter as well, before it became X. Social media “was more of a discovery tool [but] as they’ve consolidated, conglomerated, and grown, there’s less organic discovery, because now we’re contending with algorithms” and AI slop.
For years, social media had been delivering diminishing returns to Dovetail’s business, showing fewer of its fans updates they’d opted into receiving while showing Pfäfflin a whole lot more garbage every time she opened the apps to the brewery’s accounts. Posts that once performed well with followers, like showcasing a specific type of glassware or articulating the brewery’s vision for Continental European-style beer, had begun to tank. “I’d be pouring my heart into these posts, and they’d get like, 14 likes,” Pfäfflin says. “And I was like, ‘What am I doing?’” And crucially, even though Dovetail was getting less out of social media, Pfäfflin’s was still putting plenty into it: she estimates she was spending a solid 10 hours each week scheduling, shooting, and posting content to its channels.
This unfavorable cost-benefit calculus grew even more lopsided for the brewer-cum-marketer in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. “It was dread,” she says, describing how she felt logging into Dovetail’s accounts to post brewery-related updates amid the shrill, snarling partisan discourse. In October of that year, she continues, “it started to click for me. ‘Is this the best way for Dovetail to make connections with our audience?’” Pfäfflin suspected there was a better way. So she began laying the groundwork to spring Dovetail free from its draining social-media dependency, and herself from the agita that came with it. In February 2025, with Donald Trump once again in the White House and Shrimp Jesus reigning blasphemously over the nation’s Facebook feeds, Pfäfflin set her scheme into motion. “I was kind of like, “Fuck it,’” she says.
“We’re breaking up with social media,” Dovetail announced on its Instagram account on Feb. 25. “Contending with algorithms, competing with AI-generated content, and noise, noise and more noise — it’s not fun.” (As if to affirm Pfäfflin’s apprehension about the platforms’ AI-addled toxicity, that very same day, President Trump posted a bizarre synthesized video of himself sunbathing with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu in a garish seaside resort meant to resemble Gaza.) On Instagram and Facebook, Dovetail would continue a social-media “situationship,” the announcement promised, maintaining a minimal presence on the platforms. “In Chicago, there’s this really robust pop-up culture” that is heavily dependent on Instagram, Pfäfflin explains, “so we [still] do a lot of collaboration posts” with those partners and vendors. “That’s kind of a powerful tool, like you’re able to actually cross promote to different audiences that way,” she says.
But beyond that maintenance posting, Pfäfflin has since shifted her remaining marketing time and energy to a decidedly Web 1.0 mode of communication: the brewery’s email newsletter, The Schnitt.
The biweekly email “gives us an opportunity to dive deeper” into aspects of Dovetail’s inspirations and offerings than ephemeral, increasingly video-first, and mostly hyperlink-averse social-media platforms. “Instagram, it wants to keep you in that platform, so you can’t link out to a cool YouTube video about Kölsch service [when] we’re doing a Kölsch service,” laments Pfäfflin. But email, based not on a for-profit platform but on a still–somewhat decentralized protocol, allows for that sort of basic digital latitude, and much more. In a decade that’s already seen Elon Musk pivot Twitter to open fascism and Mark Zuckerberg pivot Meta’s Facebook and Instagram to “the metaverse” and AI slop (and less-open fascism), The Schnitt also gives Dovetail more flexibility and reliability for reaching its audience. “I don’t own the followers on Facebook, I don’t own the followers on Instagram. I don’t own the followers on Twitter. But if for any reason our email provider goes out of business or whatever, I can take that audience I built with me,” she says. (Or is forced out of business, as TikTok appeared to be last year before Trump’s victory ushered in a new era of corporate regulatory corruption.) “You can’t do the same with social media.”
The joke goes that social-media isn’t an airport: you don’t have to announce your departure. But while Dovetail certainly isn’t the only brewery to eschew The Platforms™️ on operational or even ideological grounds, its recent (partial) departure from social media is animated by an appealing logic that’s worth amplifying. If craft brewing was simpatico with social media at one point — and I think there’s a decent case to be made that it never really was — it’s increasingly less so. Consolidated and controlled by capricious, reactionary billionaires and their bloodless shareholder-maximizing minions, Web 2.0’s platforms are increasingly in conflict with both the ethos and the interests of small, independent breweries like Dovetail. By contrast, email newsletters like The Schnitt have always been simpatico with the segment’s early emphases on quality, curiosity, and anti-corporate do-it-yourself-edness.
Moreover, we just lived through an era of American craft brewing as optimized for Instagram. And look where it left the industry: lousy with look-a-like post-industrial taprooms, opaque juice-bomb hazy India Pale Ales, and a whole lot of apathetic, overwhelmed customers. Pfäfflin is empathic that Dovetail hasn’t gone fully dark on its social-media channels, and that other breweries may still be getting more out of their own channels than hers was. But four months into the shift, its taproom sales — one of her key indicators for return on marketing — are “chugging along,” and its marketer is, too.
“I do feel better,” says Pfäfflin. “I’ll sign off the newsletter so [readers] know that a human is producing this newsletter, and I get a lot more direct feedback doing it that way. That means a lot.” Nothing dumb or shameful about leaning into that.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
When I filed this column late last month about how craft brewing’s first-wave hotbeds are flashing warning signs for the rest of the industry, I wasn’t wanting for examples. But unfortunately, a new one… er, new two quickly emerged anyway. Not only did Denver’s heavy-metal-themed TRVE Brewing announce the closure of its original location in Colorado’s capital after 13 years last week — it also confirmed it was shutting down its outpost in Asheville, N.C. I hate to be right about this sort of thing.
📈 Ups…
Alamo Beer Co. is emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy with a new owner and a new deal to produce a King of the Hill-inspired beer… After a favorable outcome in a powerful Senate subcommittee, it looks like the THC beverage industry will live to fight another year…
📉 …and downs
After failing since “Liberation Day” to cut any meaningful trade deals, President Trump pushed the deadline on reciprocal levies to Aug. 1, so uncertainty continues its reign… Ohio Eagle will lay off all 178 of its employees when it sells to middle-tier private-equity player Redwood Holdings in September…
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