Keep your eyes open when you go to breweries. Who’s there? Do they look like you? Do you see them elsewhere? While going to breweries to get beer is a bigger and bigger social occasion these days, it’s still a small minority of Americans who do it and it’s a self-selecting group of folks.

Chances are, the demographic at any given brewery tasting room is fairly homogeneous. There are obvious outliers, and that’s rad, but they’re just that. Rad outliers. There are so many more folks out there who love and deserve awesome, local beer! We started HenHouse without a tasting room. For our first four years, we sold all our beer wholesale, and one of the first things we learned is you shouldn’t rule anyone out. Not every customer will come to you, but that doesn’t mean the ones you have to pursue are any less valuable. Go into that honky tonk with an IPA! Go into that Mexican restaurant with a Saison! Those folks might not be coming to the uber-hyped DIPA release, but they drink beer! You should try to sell it to them.

Perhaps more immediately noticeable in the self-segregation of brewery tasting rooms is the skew toward IPAs. No one stands in line for the Irish Stout can release. No one travels across the country to the brewery just to buy the Altbier. IPA dominates the brewery can release to the exclusion of other styles, and why not? It sells better and keeps the bills paid. However, the best-selling beer in the country is still Light Lager.

That’s not to say Light Lager is the best beer, but rather, what sells in a brewery taproom is not necessarily what most folks are interested in drinking. When we circle the wagons and focus on own-premise sales, we never get a Left Hand Milk Stout or an Allagash White or a New Glarus Spotted Cow, perfect beers with a huge audience beyond simply what sells well at the brewery. These are extraordinary beers that only exist because those folks went out and found their audience far beyond the walls of the brewery.

It’s beneficial for our souls and creativity to pursue a more diverse group of customers. We live in an age of voluntary isolation, both in terms of who we talk to and what we read, watch, and listen to, but also in terms of who we actually interact with when we’re out in our communities. Breweries love saying they create community and are community-focused (In fact, we say that at HenHouse!), but if we want to be taken seriously as sources of community connection, then we have to do more than cater to those self-selecting groups of brewery visitors.

The neighborhood bar is a community-focused business, and we need to support them. The local restaurant is a community-focused business, and we need to support them. And most of the time, they have a different community than the brewery tasting room. We would be negligent as folks growing communities to ignore that.