Verboten Brewing

Verboten Brewing, at just over a year old I was thinking of cutting them some slack. However, the industry doesn't cut anybody slack. Upon reviewing the HTML code for Verboten's website, I was initially impressed. There is no clutter, no filler, no pointless coding; it keeps it simple. In this aspect many breweries (and websites in general) have too much "filler" coding that does nothing for the website. With not nearly as much filler the website is faster and smoother to load.

With that being said, they have terrible keywords. The most frequent keyword I could find was "verboten." Verboten has a low search volume and may not be wise to use. The keyword "micro brewery" is searched an average of 1,600 times per month. This gives an opportunity to list it in keywords. It's not too high to be overshadowed, but not too few to go unsearched.  Another possible keyword is "craft beer." This keyword receives an average of 20 monthly searches in the Loveland area. This may be only 20 a month but with the keyword is placed where need be those 20 people may be directed to Verboten brewing.

Verboten Brewing

The ramblings of one hoppy guy,
Chris

Avery Brewing Company

In a world of social media, where does Avery Brewing sit? Avery uses their Facebook page to make announcements, show events and sometimes just for a couple cool pictures. This gives users all the information about the brewery that they require, no need to send them on a hunt to find the information. Their Twitter page is linked to their Facebook so it posts all the same information. In some cases I have disagreed with this. However, in this case I think it works; Avery is a growing brewery with a lot going on, why make people go back and forth between Facebook and Twitter to find all different information?
Aside from these fan favorite social media sites, I have yet to mention Instagram in a post before. I enjoy Avery's use of Instagram, it has a variety of different pictures. They range from beer, to customers, to employees. It brings a friendly feeling to the brewery. The images of employees show what the brewery is all about, the images of customers show how much fun they are having and the images of beer show how much variety they have (it also makes me quite thirsty). This is a very proficient use of Instagram, keep at it Avery!
The only suggestion I have in terms of social media for Avery Brewing is the consistency of pictures on Instagram. They will post 5 in a couple days then wait a week to put another picture up. If they have sporadic postings their followers may overlook the images with everything else that is in their feed. Other than that, keep up the good work, they are on the right path.

Avery Brewing Company

The ramblings of one hoppy guy,
Chris

Black Bottle Brewery

Upon attended Black Bottle I happily received many delicious beers. Black Bottle brews many different types of beer, they don't stick to one style, this gives them a larger variety to please many people, including me. They have branded themselves as "hipsters," with some beers even having hipster in the name and a sign on the front door saying, "Hipsters, use back entrance." It is quite unique and somewhat caters to that "hipster" audience.

As much as I would love to talk about branding I'm here today to talk about one page on Black Bottle's website, the page called vids. This page is relatively small and contains 5 videos. Why is this page significant you ask? It enhances the brand image and promotes the brewery in a friendly way. These videos tell a lot of information about the brewery: staff, brewing, activities and more. However, instead of just telling the audience this information they do it in a comedic way. This way the audience will stay entertained and watch the videos instead of just skipping them. This page displays Black Bottle's brand image very well and can be accessed right away from the home page. Well done Black Bottle, I enjoyed your promotional techniques. Keep up the good work.

Black Bottle Brewery

The ramblings of one hoppy guy,
Chris

New Belgium Brewery

Today we will review New Belgium, one of the largest microbreweries in the United States. They have excellent promotion practices. The new endenvor set around Snapshot is wonderful. They have a van that travels in which people take very odd pictures with and can upload to the website and social media. This broadens their reach and people can see what kind of fun adventures New Belgium embarks on.

However, have you ever reviewed their website, even taken a look at it? If you take a look you'll see it needs some work. the Snapshot Wheat page specifically. I didn't even have to go into the HTML coding to see the problem. They have massive amounts of HTML code displayed on top of the page. This is most likely a mistake that was missed upon updating the page. If goes over pictures and text making the website annoying to navigate. For an organization so large, with so much experience, I would think they would be beyond issues such as this one. This should be easily fixable and I would think they would have jumped on it immediately! Hopefully they fix it soon because it is a nuisance for the website and could easily detract people from the website.



New Belgium Brewery

The ramblings of one hoppy guy,
Chris

The Grimm Brothers

I went to the Grimm Brothers on Monday night, which happened to be trivia night. The event was fun and entertaining. The beer was average. But that may just be my personal opinion, I like variety and they are all German style beers. And I met this guy in the picture to the right, his name is Aaron, and he was an excellent bartender. He let me take a picture of him taking a picture of me.



Last week we look at an example of an exceptional use of a website, this week I will dissect the Grimm Brothers website. If you can't take criticism (or adventure) than I would not recommend reading this.

Told from the point of view of the Brothers Grimm
Once Upon A Time... The Grimm Brothers Brewery created a website. It was filled with information about beer and the brewery. What an ominous website it was. Truly embracing the dark German styles. This brewery had no idea of the future that lie ahead. The all knowing power of the Internet...Google...would not haveth what the website produced...eth.  Google sent a brave knight known as, that hoppy guy, to Grimm Brothers. Upon entering the site he encountered 2 error messages. For what reason? He does not know, the pages tried to relocate him but failed. After 2 more attempts the pages finally opened. The knight then took on a quest, he opened the HTML coding. To his fears the coding was an ugly beast. It was filled with unnecessary fluff that dragged the website down. The most frightening part of all, this beast, with all its code, had not alt tags or meta descriptions! It was most frightening! How is the all knowing Google supposed to rank a website when it give no tags? Google won't blink an eye at you if you lack these aspects. The Google rankings will plummet. The Grimm Brothers Brewery has a problem they need to overcome. They have a difficult road ahead.
The tale of the Grimm Brothers and the beast of HTML.

All joking aside. The website needs work, it has no keywords on it, not meta descriptions, no alt tags for images. It has so much potential, it just needs a little extra work.

Grimm Brothers Brewhouse

The ramblings of one hoppy guy,
Chris

The Great Divide

Located in Denver, CO

The Great Divide Brewery was founded by Brian Dunn in 1994. Prior to starting his brewery Dunn home brewed out of his garage. His friends loved his beer so much they agreed to help fund him to start his own brewery. After the help of his friends Dunn was still $50,000 short, he went to 11 different banks around time to get loans. They all liked his plans enough to help fund the start up. Today, in my opinion, The Great Divide is the best thing to come out of Denver.

They have grown so much since then, but how does their website fair? Does it keep up with competitors? Let's take a look into the HTML code to begin. The title page starts with "<meta name="Keywords" content="denver brewery, microbrew, award-winning craft beer, tap room" />." These are few keywords, but they get the point across. They're not too vague as to get buried in Google results but they are searched enough to to still come up as top results.

The page entitled "Beers" has more keywords, they consist of "great divide beer," "microbrew," "yeti," and "collette." Obviously other breweries will not be using the key phrase "great divide beer," so they have that one down. However, "microbrew" has an average of 3,600 searches a month. Many breweries use this keyword and Great Divide becomes overshadowed and lost in the results. Should they bother with that keyword or find another? It wouldn't hurt to experiment a little bit.

Aside from the meta keywords, how is the design? Can you look it up on different devices? Yes. The website is fully optimized for tablet and phone. It works just as well on these platforms and is easy to navigate and find information.

So, do they keep up with their competition? Absolutely, they don't just rely on their great beer to get them through, they also have excellent website design.

The Great Divide

The ramblings of one hoppy guy,
Chris 

Funkwerks

I would like to start out by saying this is the first time I have had Funkwerks. Needless to say, I am impressed. I was a little nervous going to the brewery because it is in a strange location for a brewery, but I guess when you think about it, so are many around Fort Collins. Funkwerks features a Saison style of brewing, but we're not here to talk about that.

Funkwerks is a smaller brewery, do they keep up with the bigger breweries online? In my opinion, no, and it shows. As of today, Feb. 9, they are following two people. They have over 4,000 followers, but how good is that if you aren't listening to people? They post updates about the brewery to let people know what is going on. Funkwerks isn't following anyone though, how do they expect to know what people want, what they are interested in online? They won't find out unless they investigate, follow some more people, interact with them. Then they may have more of an insight into what the customer wants.

One thing they do well is email. They take the information they post on Twitter and Facebook and put it into a newsletter.

The email is done well. There is a large amount of text, but for being a monthly newsletter it works being that wordy. It had a great deal of pictures and information about new beers, events and other information. It follows email guidelines and format. But if the email works fine then why even use Twitter? It's the same format as their emails. How I see it, they have a couple options, forget Twitter because they're not using it well, or find somebody who knows what they're doing with Twitter to manage it and make it more useful.

 Funkwerks

 The ramblings of one hoppy guy,
Chris