Got Beer? Doom and Gloom Clickbait

If you don’t know what clickbait is, then I’d love to know if it’s comfy under that rock you live beneath, if people leave you alone to get work done, and what the rent costs.

Here’s an explanation for you rock-dwelling future neighbors: Clickbait is basically a short article written by an ad-saturated website planted in your social media feed by spying programs designed to get you to want to click on them by promoting topics you care about. Things like: “Top Ten Reasons the Star Wars Prequels are Actually Good” and other things that are factually incorrect.

I’ve noticed popping up on my feed a repeat of the same formulaic article by different writers on different sites and it’s called “The Death of the Craft Beer Movement.”

This perplexes me. So, yes, I click on it and read it. Though I do so on my tablet so I can clear the memory immediately after reading the article on the site full of spyware and viruses, like shaking an Etch A Sketch clean.

Had this been one or two pieces of clickbait, I wouldn’t even be talking about this, but it got me thinking. In my research for the article about goses, I came across a number of these articles all taking aim at craft beer and even going so far as to use great big tombstones for the top photo, claiming that the craft beer movement died this year.

What the actual fermenting f***?

I started to wonder where this strange idea was coming from. Craft beer isn’t a movement that can die. Sure, it might apex and slow down, and the growth might reverse itself to a degree. But to die out entirely? How would that work? Now that people can taste beer made with barley and hops, will they just suddenly all say, “Whoops, this is just too much flavor for me. I guess it’s time to go back to drinking Schlitz.”

RI has new breweries popping up like Starbucks. There’s always a new beer to get excited about, a style to try, or a trend to experiment with. Sure, most trends rub me the wrong way personally, but you don’t hear me calling for the death of the entire movement.

Were I slightly more paranoid than I am, I might think this has something to do with the impending conglomeration of AB-Inbev and Miller-Coors. This has worried many in the industry, as the monopoly produced by this merger will be detrimental to the market. However, that’s not what these articles are talking about. They’re blaming the end of the craft beer movement on goses.

Hmmm.

Were I slightly more cynical, I’d think someone’s marketing department was setting us up. Like the advertising catastrophe on Sony’s latest not-quite-blockbuster, Ghostbusters, this seems like a marketing department trying to tell a group of free-thinking people what reality is. But the craft beer movement isn’t susceptible to such blatant efforts. It’s a group of free-thinking, creative, passionate people dedicated to an art. Such people rarely believe everything they hear.

It wouldn’t surprise me if these articles were commissioned by some deranged marketing manager at one of the big companies. But then, I have no proof that this is actually what’s happening. It’s pure speculation founded on nothing more than a wild theory, supported by a few glistening drops of information and little else. It may be nothing more than a brief piece of strange paranoia justified by nothing.

Just like clickbait articles.