Yesterday I received a couple of emails (spam) from the PR firm on behalf of Steam Whistle Brewing.  For those who don’t know, Steam Whistle is an Ontario based brewery who brew a pilsner and only a pilsner.  Steam Whistle Pilsner is sometimes available in BC at the better beer stores (Brewery Creek for example), but the average BC beer drinker won’t have heard of it, much less tasted it.  It is a tasty pilsner though, a beer I would recommend to you Bud Light Lime drinkers out there, and it is a shame it is not more widely available out west.

What I want to know is, why did Steam Whistle waste their money on hiring these PR guys? Neither email I received was addressed to me and both were clearly spam, likely sent to every beer related website in Canada.  Also, the first email was an invite to a pub crawl in Toronto on Thursday (I’ll be there) and the second was promoting a contest, where the link to the contest in the email didn’t even work (the correct link is on Steam Whistle’s website and it looks like a good contest worth winning).  I have nothing against Steam Whistle, but I do feel like this means of marketing is a problem in the beer industry.  Why hire an ineffectual PR firm to promote Steam Whistle Pilsner in BC when it is hardly available here?  In my opinion, using the PR money (PR firms aren’t cheap) to get their beer into BC liquor stores would be a better strategy.  An even better strategy would be to have Steam Whistle employees who know and love their beer establish real relationships with prominent beer bloggers (probably not us, but we’d be friends with them anyway).  Why pay a passionless suit when there is this whole free internet thing out there that companies can use to reach people with?

Cheers,

Chris