Some background: Blake Collins (disclosure: a friend, plus I officiated his wedding) wrote a one-star Yelp review of the new World of Beer location downtown. He's not the only person to give the place a bad review (nine of the fifteen reviews are one or two stars, although, to be fair, there are four five star reviews), but the fact that Blake works at the nearby Good Oak Bar seemed to upset whoever holds the keys to the WOB Facebook account, so this went public on Saturday night:

BLAKE C...show your face little girl...anyone know this little diaper boy? We gotta start calling these little girls out! Our owners and managers, all from Tucson, work to bring hundreds of beers here, and work with our local brewers to bring dozens of beers that this little sissy has never seen and this little un-potty trained kid has gotta hate on us and try to bring our friends like Tap & Bottle into the fold? Who is this little girl that hates job creators and local beer?

It didn't take long for a stream of confused comments to follow (including mine, remarking on the fact that we were witnessing a social media trainwreck in real time), but any comment that was even mildly negative or perplexed was quickly deleted. In my case, my comment was expunged and I was blocked from World of Beer's page. The only comment that did seem to stay online was one from someone who offered to punch Blake in the face if World of Beer would give him a job. In fact, World of Beer Tucson "liked" that remark. After a while, the whole thread was deleted, seemingly never to be acknowledged again.

I don't have much room to talk about responding emotionally on Facebook (although I did leave my post up, for what that's worth), and yes, I understand the feeling when someone seemingly bad-mouths your employer when they may have a conflict of interest, but nearly all of the ways of going about addressing that sort of thing would be better than a somewhat misogynist rant (and one with a relatively limited vocabulary insult-wise as well...we get it, diapers, baby, potty-training, enough already).

Oddly enough, part of Blake's shot at World of Beer was that it caters to a "bro" audience which the response only works to confirm. There's clearly room for plenty of places to drink downtown serving a variety of audiences and based on everything I've heard, it would appear World of Beer will be fine, but for awhile on Saturday night, it appears they were aiming to discourage people from ever stopping in.