Modern Times Beer Company is one of the most unique breweries located in San Diego, California.
Founded in 2013 by Jacob McKean, this young brewery has quickly become a favorite brewery to many people.
Jacob McKean worked in the marketing department at Stone Brewing Company for 2 years before venturing on his own and starting his own brewery.
But everything wasn’t fun and games, he spent 18 months planning and raising a total of 1.25 million dollars before opening the doors to his own brewery–Modern Times.
Modern Times prides themselves by being very transparent by actually publishing their beer recipes for home brewers to try to replicate them on their own.
Jacob, the founder, also goes on Reddit where he periodically does AKA’s to try to help out and give insights to people who are aspiring to start their own breweries or are just fans of Modern Times.
Most recently the brewery has launched an in-house coffee house that even has a retrofitted antique diving helmet with 4 taps of delicious, cold brew coffee.
Naturally, a brewery as unique as Modern Times has developed a great following. This following is especially noticeable when you look at their online presence and their social media channels.
I interviewed Dan Reed, who is the Communications Warlock at Modern Times and asked him a few questions about their online strategy and philosophy.
How important is it for Modern Times Brewery to have a strong presence on social media?
Dan: The number of moving parts involved in our beer and coffee programs make a strong social media presence pretty essential. Between festivals, events, bottle sales, new releases, new markets, and various expansions, there’s a lot of information to communicate to our customers on a daily basis. Social media a great way to do that and still have an honest, non-invasive conversation with people.
How many hours do you or your team spend on social media a week?
Dan: I’ll put it this way: If I’m not in a meeting or responding to an email, I’m usually working on something for social media.
How many hours do you feel are actually necessary in order to do social media right?
Dan: I don’t know that there’s really a universal metric for that. It’s dependent on your particular business model, your aesthetic, and how your audience likes to communicate. The way that we approach it, it’s basically a full-time job. Working with each department to plan a posting schedule that reinforces our current goals, getting the right photos, coordinating with the art department, creating copy, and interacting with our community constitutes a pretty sizable time investment. It’s a lot like being an embedded reporter, minus the personal risk and journalistic integrity, and plus free beer.
Would you say social media for a brewery is a necessity or a luxury in today’s digital age?
Dan: Again, it depends on your particular business approach, but it’s definitely a necessity for us.
If you had to pick one social media platform for Modern Times, which one would it be and why?
Dan: Until we roll out our sexy new Tinder campaign, I’d definitely go with Instagram–it allows us to post lots of pretty photos of beer while retaining the freedom to get as absurdly verbose as we like–and it’s yet to be monetized into irrelevancy.
What is your biggest frustration about Social Media as it relates to a brewery?
Dan: There are a lot of fairly arbitrary laws about alcohol advertising that factor into social media. Not being able to announce an off-site event if we don’t have a rep there, for instance, or the fact that we have to make ridiculous allusions to a store that carries our beer instead of just saying the name. They’re not that significant, but it can get a bit tedious.
How do you measure the ROI of social media?
Dan: It’s a pretty observable correlation for us, so we don’t do a lot of exhaustive reporting (which, having done at other jobs, I view as a pretty mixed bag). Aside from knowing our average engagement and seeing how the posts themselves perform, I have a lot of direct contact with the tasting room and merch teams on a daily basis, so it’s easy to track results for beer, merchandise, and events in real time.
What type of advice would you give to new microbreweries starting out that want to have a strong social media presence?
Dan: Be selective about how and what you promote; it’s easy to get lost in flyers and announcements and lose the personality behind the beer, which is a huge part of what makes people want to follow you. My favorite social accounts are a conversation first and a promotional tool second. If you cultivate a good social community, they’ll often keep each other informed more effectively than you can. And always be touching base with the people you work with. It sounds easy, but this still bites me in the ass occasionally. Breweries are many-headed beasts, and most departments are thinking about what they need to accomplish, not a promotional timeline. Having a solid picture of everyone’s calendar is the difference between well-planned promotion and desperate, last minute spamming.
Dan Reed – Communications Warlock at Modern Time Beer, San Diego, CA.
Hobbies?
Making music and rolling twenty-sided dice
Favorite beer style?
Ever changing. At the moment: funky saisons and anything with rye
Favorite Modern Times beer?
My go-to is Fortunate Islands; it might be the most crushable beer in history. As far as the rarer stuff, if I could bathe every evening in a tank of Nautilus Harbor (our white wine barrel-aged saison with plums), I would.
Favorite brewery other than Modern Times?
I don’t think I could pick a favorite–there are simply too many mitigating factors. I just got to hit up Black Project in Denver, and that was pretty stellar; they’re definitely in my current top 5.
