Business

Beer Institute’s Campaign Shows the Faces of the Industry

The Beer Institute’s “Faces of Beer” website draws attention to the people behind the beer industry.

As part of a broader campaign called Pride Starts Here, the Beer Institute (BI) has launched a webpage called “Faces of Beer” that spotlights individual beer industry workers. The campaign helps “tell people who we are as an industry,” said President and CEO Jim McGreevy. It provides “a sense of the backstory of beer.”

BI represents brewers of various sizes, as well as importers and suppliers. Suppliers include, for example, enterprises that manufacture bottles and cans, cardboard case boxes, and brewing equipment. “We have a diverse group of members in our organization,” McGreevy said.

The beer industry contributed more than $350 billion to the economy in 2016, and the campaign helps showcase both the industry’s economic contribution and the people who make the industry run. “We think it’s important for Congress and other policymakers to know who the people behind the beer are,” McGreevy said.

Faces of Beer shows a photo of each person, along with a snippet about what they do and how they contribute to growing, creating, producing, or delivering beer. The people profiled include brewmasters, a barley grower, a transportation manager, a laboratory manager, a CEO, and an environmental and sustainability engineer. The companies they work for range from M&M Farms in Berthoud, Colorado, to MillerCoors in Fort Worth, Texas.

“Being able to highlight the breadth of the industry and the people in it is powerful for us and, we hope, powerful to the viewer,” McGreevy said.

Nearly 65,000 Americans work for brewers and importers, and more than 134,000 work for beer distributors. Directly and indirectly, the beer industry employs more than 2.2 million Americans, according to the BI’s 2017 Beer Serves America study, which was released in May. The study says that one job in the brewing industry creates 33 jobs in other industries, such as farming, transportation, packaging, and equipment manufacturing.

The strength of the industry lies in the men and woman who go to work in it every day, McGreevy said. “It’s one thing to go into a bar and order and enjoy a beer, but it’s another to understand that your consumption of the product helps keep people employed.”

BI is spreading word about Faces of Beer through social media and display advertising, and the group plans to talk about it in meetings on the Hill.

Feedback so far has been positive, McGreevy said. “Our members love it.” Beer is the most popular alcoholic beverage in the U.S., and “we want to celebrate that,” he said. “It’s really a celebration of beer.”

(Courtesy of the Beer Institute)

Allison Torres Burtka

By Allison Torres Burtka

Allison Torres Burtka, a longtime association journalist, is a freelance writer and editor in West Bloomfield, Michigan. MORE

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