Drink tank: The Great Hype Machine

We all love the thrill of trying something new, but has pre-launch hysteria gone too far? Matthew Curtis finds out

When Troy Casey opened his brewery, Casey Brewing and Blending in late 2013 he probably didn’t expect that just a few months later people would be standing in line for up to eight hours to buy his beers. However that’s exactly what happened. Originally, Casey would open his brewery just one Saturday of every month to retail his artfully constructed sour beers, packaged exclusively in corked and caged 750ml bottles.

Word of Casey’s inherent quality spread fast, thanks to websites such as Untapped and Ratebeer, which marked Casey as 2015’s ‘best new brewery in the world’ at its 2015 awards. Once word spread, people started arriving in their droves to buy his beer, which is produced in very small quantities. The brewery’s remote location in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, almost a three-hour drive from Denver, didn’t seem to dissuade people either. Things got really weird when people started camping outside the brewery the night before bottle releases.

“I’m not really sure why people were lining up outside the brewery for eight hours, I guess we’re making a product that people really want,” Casey says of the situation once witnessed outside his brewery on a monthly basis. “Beer is so much more than just a drink. People want to know as much as they can about it and that information affects their drinking experience.”

Casey has since expanded the taproom opening hours and made access exclusive to advanced ticket holders in order to counter this issue. Things have certainly calmed down since this came into place. However, scenes like those witnessed at Casey are becoming commonplace when rare or sought-after beers are released in the US. New breweries such as Tired Hands in Philadelphia or Other Half in Brooklyn regularly deal with huge queues of excited punters on new beer release days. California’s Russian River practically experience mass hysteria when their annually launched Pliny the Younger hits the taps in February. With beer geeks booking up every hotel room in town months in advance to wbe there when this limited beer is pouring.

We’re beginning to see this level of excitement in the UK too, with over 1000 people turned away from Beavertown’s fourth birthday party in February this year due to lack of space. They weren’t expecting to hit the capacity of their venue within just an hour, only closing the gates when they feared people’s safety might be compromised. But is this genuine excitement that events and beer releases like Casey’s are generating, or is our enhanced awareness thanks to the prevalence of modern communication making use afraid of missing out?

The fear of missing out, or ‘FoMO’ is a relatively modern phenomenon, described by Wikipedia as “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.” Basically, you see something you really want to experience on the internet and then tear yourself up a little inside when you realise you can’t go. This feeling is only worsened when you realise all of your friends will be experiencing this thing without you. 

Thanks to its tightly knit, internet-based community, beer is guilty of causing copious amounts of FoMO among its fans. Magic Rock brewery of Huddersfield, Yorkshire has been ramping up the hype each year for the annual release of its highly limited Triple IPA, Unhuman Cannonball. This hype, which is mostly perpetuated by fans as opposed to the brewery itself, results in the beer selling out rapidly, be it at physical launch events or online.

“To be honest with you, I kind of resent the notion that we actively hype things; our only outlet to tell people about things is social media and we give all our beers the same amount of promotion through those channels.” Magic Rock Founder and Managing Director Richard Burhouse says. “Don’t get me wrong, the fact that potential customers pick this up and run with it is great, and the demand stimulated is fantastic for sales, but to my mind all we are doing is publicising the beer through the normal channels and sharing our excitement.”

Another brewery that could be accused of stoking the hype train with rocket fuel is Manchester’s Cloudwater. Its evolving series of Double IPAs have been the source of much fervour among beer fans. Cloudwater MD and Founder Paul Jones thinks modern beer culture might be to blame. 

“I believe a form of hype exists in almost every walk of life, when someone cares deeply about an experience.” Jones says. “But it’s maybe only in beer, and most definitely quite recently, that reputation – viewed as wholly positive in almost every other industry and field – becomes hype fuelled by a fear of missing out.”

But can brewery owners like Burhouse and Jones, who are merely trying to make a living selling a product, be accused of causing this hype? And is it a bad thing? Jones doesn’t think so: “A good reputation, served by good quality products often generates good publicity… If I were to say there’s a disadvantage to a good reputation it’d be quite foolish.”

Speaking to brewers is one thing, but FoMO affects the consumer first and foremost, so I spoke to some beer fans to find out how it affects them. 

Niall McNeill missed out on the first iteration of Cloudwater’s DIPA. “That was a wrench, a beer that I’ll never get to taste. It’s quite difficult to resist the pang of a new beer or a new brewery and even more difficult now compared to how it was three or four years ago,” he says.

Beer blogger Justin Mason is more reserved in his approach to limited edition beers: “Once you realise that it’s impossible to drink everything, then the fear of missing out lessens somewhat,” Mason says. “You may well feel a pang of regret when everyone appears to be raving about a beer you’ll never have, but the reality of the situation… is that if you miss this week’s special release, then there’ll be another two or three along next week.”

The thing is, as painful as it may sound to us as drinkers, the hype that stirs those emotions within us generates the kind of marketing that’s crucial to young breweries like Cloudwater, Magic Rock and Casey. “I wouldn’t change anything at all, even though it was very stressful to have such large single day releases.” Casey says of the early days with eight-hour queues. “We were so fortunate to get that much attention soon after we opened, it was amazing.”

For those that are still finding all the hype and FoMO that it causes too much, I have a very simple solution. Turn off the internet, put down your phone and head to your local pub. There’s lots of good vibes and great beer there and, if you’re lucky, you just might make the friends who couldn’t join you a little bit jealous.