I just started following someone on Instagram

Published: January 31, 2014

The someone I’m following is an entity referring to itself as “@frenchbroadbrewing”. Sound shady? “But, faithful bloggist,” I can hear you saying, “why do you call a corporate body a ‘someone’? Did you not watch the pilot of Aaron Sorkin’s ‘The Newsroom’ and were you not moved by his line about how a corporation wasn’t a person because a corporation can’t hold the door open for a lady? Isn’t a corporate body by definition an assembly of someones?”

And so it is, incisive reader: which is why we should not be surprised to find, upon first bringing up @frenchbroadbrewing’s “page” on our Instagram app on our phone, a variety of someones all at work doing brewery sort of things: gazing contemplatively into cold daybreak before milling, performing joyless autopsies on old kegs, grabbing a moment’s reprieve leaning against a pallet of canned Rebels.

Pictured in none of these, but present for all, is Peter “Pete” (“Carbondale”) Batinski, Assistant Brewer, a man who knows his way around a brewhouse. Peter’s as familiar with the lovibond color scale as he is new media. He can help you with your phone; he’s standing behind his in all these pictures, whittling choice moments off the day, popping captions under ’em, extending them to the world like keys, inviting whosoever has a yen for it right the hell in. There’s a picture of the kettle that makes it look like, I don’t know, a storm is building over an alien landscape, or something. We should market a beer like that, actually.

INTERLUDE WITH DADDY MUMBLES

Daddy Mumbles walks down the steps and says, “Oh hell. What now.”

I tell Daddy Mumbles I’m writing a blog post to advertise Peter’s new Instagram account.

Daddy Mumbles sez, “I maybe just torpedoed our social media profile,” or something to that effect, explaining he’s tweeted something incendiary re: our property taxes (i.e., should he mail them directly to New Belgium?)

[Follow Daddy Mumbles’ pithy, incendiary missives at @FrenchBroadBrew]

Daddy Mumbles sez, “You should write something about how I,” he gestures, “whatever you call me, am so behind, I have no idea what you write on these things.”

“You mean, like, Daddy Mumbles is behind the social media regulatory eight ball.”

“Exactly.”

Yes, sir!

END

To paraphrase Norman Mailer, how cruel is life, but how just, that it destroys a man who won’t change. Amid the maelstrom of arguable things that constitute the world and our perception of it here in Craft County, USA, at least these two facts are indisputable:

1) We are the second oldest brewery in Asheville.

2) We are the least marketed brewery in Asheville.

But the new blood doesn’t always fall into lockstep behind the old blood. Sometimes it forces a change. We will poke our heads out from under this great big turtle shell. We will not be pretty or new or endlessly funded, but we won’t hide, either.

We open our door for you.

-D.W.

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