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Cheers to a Wildly Successful Inaugural ‘National Independent Beer Run Day’

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Julia Herz is executive director of the American Homebrewers Association® (AHA)—the nation’s largest hobbyist not for profit organization for homebrewers and fermented beverages. Julia is a BJCP Certified beer judge, Advanced Cicerone®, medal-winning homebrewer and co-author of Beer Pairing: The Essential Guide from the Pairing Pros (Voyager Press, 2015) and the CraftBeer.com Beer & Food Guide. Prior to joining the AHA, Julia was the craft beer program director and publisher of CraftBeer.com for the Brewers Association.

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Give yourselves a round of applause—and while you’re at it, a round of independent craft beer.

Though we still need to crunch the numbers, we can report with confidence that the first ever National Independent Beer Run Day was a runaway success, and your engagement and enthusiasm proved pivotal.

Here’s a quick recap of what we accomplished: We created a brand-new holiday—National Independent Beer Run Day, July 3—encouraging beer lovers to celebrate American independence with beer made by America’s 7,300+ small and independent brewers.

Our rallying cry: Don’t forget the independent craft beer this Independence Day.

The campaign was promoted through paid social media, Pandora radio spots and sponsored playlists, a content collection on CraftBeer.com, a media relations effort, and (most important) sharing and support via thousands of social media posts from craft brewers.

Core to the campaign was a series of videos in which people forget some Fourth of July essentials—except, of course, the independent craft beer. If you haven’t seen the videos, check them out. They may be silly but they’re seriously on message: indie craft beer is an essential ingredient for Independence Day.

Although we need time to tabulate the full results, a quick look back on the lead-up to July 3 shows a robust spike in Google searches for “Independent Beer,” and we saw an outpouring of organic engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Here are examples from craft breweries who got into into the spirit:

Additionally, we made a world-record attempt at the longest ‘cheers,’ stating the name of EACH of the 7,300 small and independent U.S. craft breweries. This aspirational and authentic video ran via Facebook Live on July 4. (Insider note: A total fluke of a global Facebook service interruption prevented us from conducting the attempt on the originally promoted July 3.) This four-hour marathon video can be streamed and shared here. So far, we’ve logged 27,800+ video views, 427 comments, and 225 shares on Facebook. Booyeah!

With all this effort, it’s good to remember: the importance of independent craft beer is clear. After all:

  • 53 percent of beer lovers share that independent ownership is important when purchasing a beer. (Sterling Rice Group AAU January 2019)
  • 60 percent of the craft consumers who have seen the seal on a package say they have purchased craft beer with the seal. (The Harris Poll/Nielsen May 16-23, 2019)

On first read, we are happy to report that National Independent Beer Run Day drew positive reactions from beer lovers and spurred a ton of engagement from breweries, who helped spread the word and shared their own events for this special new holiday. Nicely done, everyone!

Additional resources and ways to engage: