Wichita craft brewers getting together to commiserate, laugh at mean things people say
Anyone who’s in the public eye knows that social media is a battlefield, and you have to develop a pretty thick skin to survive some of the haters.
The owners of Wichita’s many craft breweries are no exception.
Fortunately, many of Wichita’s brewers have, in addition to thick skins, good senses of humor, and they’ve almost all agreed to participate in an event scheduled for next week that should be entertaining for spectators and cathartic for the brewers.
It’s called Mean Tweets: Wichita Brewery Edition, and it will involve members of the brewing community standing up before a crowd and reading aloud the very mean, no good comments posted about them by internet trolls or otherwise unkind and excessively cruel users of Twitter, Yelp and Untapped.
“Unleash the trolls!” reads the invite posted by owner B.J. Hunt on social media. “Can our brewers read these mean tweets without shedding a tear in their craft beer?”
The event will happen at 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 23, at PourHouse ICT, Walnut River Brewing Company’s tap room and restaurant at 711 E. Douglas. It’ll happen on the brewery’s upper level, and spectators are welcome.
Hunt said he stole the idea for the event from friends who own Bier Station in Kansas City, who put on a similar event. The whole mean tweet movement was started years ago by comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who was known to invite celebrities on his talk show to read aloud mean tweets about themselves.
Hunt said the Kansas City event was pretty raucous.
“It was pretty funny because some of the breweries really had a great time with it, and for a few of them, it was really painful,” Hunt said.
Each brewery will bring its own mean tweets, and Hunt said he expects some doozies. One that he plans to read, he said, is so nasty, so expletive ridden that “I cannot have you publish it,” he said.
Being targeted by such commenters is part of the deal, Hunt said, and he knows his fellow brewers have accepted it, too. “We know we’re not everybody’s cup of beer, for lack of a better term,” he said.
Reading the comments out loud as a community takes some of their hurtful power away, Hunt said. Plus, some of them are just plain funny.
Nearly all of the local breweries will be there, Hunt said. Nortons Brewing Co. is planning to bring eight people and Jeremy Horn from Wichita Brewing Company is bringing five, he said. There will also be brewers present from Central Standard Brewing, Hopping Gnome Brewing Company, River City Brewing Company, Hank is Wiser Brewery, Aero Plains Brewing, Augustino Brewing Company, Third Place Brewing and Nitro Joe’s.
“We all have a good time laughing at each other’s expense,” Hunt said. “It’s a great way for all of us beer folks to get together and have a beer.”
This story was originally published January 14, 2020 at 5:01 AM.
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