Photography: Your Phone Is Not Enough

Closely related to branding is photography. Your social media needs images. Your website needs images. Your listings need images. And those images need to be good.

"Good" doesn't mean a blurry phone photo of a pint glass on a sticky bar top. It means well-lit, well-composed shots that make your beer look appealing. It means consistent styling that fits your brand. It means product shots, lifestyle shots, behind-the-scenes shots, event shots — all at a quality level that doesn't look embarrassingly amateur next to your competitors' feeds.

Professional food and drink photography is a skill. Lighting beer is surprisingly difficult — you're dealing with a translucent liquid in a reflective glass, often in brewery environments with harsh fluorescent lighting and cluttered backgrounds. A professional photographer will know how to handle this. Your phone, even a good one, will give you flat, uninspiring images that do your beer no favours.

But professional photography costs money and time. So you learn to do it yourself, badly at first, and slowly get better. You watch tutorials, buy a ring light, clear a corner of the brewery as a makeshift photo area, and spend your Sunday evenings editing photos when you should be resting. It's another skill you never expected to need, another demand on time you don't have.