I come from the “over the bridge” of Grain and Grape customer, going back quite a few years now - and I recall the early iterations of Keg King coming from some kind of cleaning products company morphing into a home brewshop/design/importer. There were always rumours of discontent and nastiness surrounding Keg King and certainly the old thread wars here 3 years ago brought that all out into the open. Indeed, Keg King has been a bit of an industry pariah ever since and that has been shown in the way they conduct themselves - they have been known to get quite nasty even to loyal customers who dare utter the words Keg Land within earshot of those few still loyal to Keg King.
Over in the west, the war between KK and KL is somewhat amusing to watch from afar, and the dirty wars continue, only now coming to a bit of a conclusion. As back in 2018 as some commented, we may only have “one big K” left soon and it doesn’t take too much to figure out which is going to go on growing and which is going to either downsize or close…. it’s as simple as who has a warehouse of unwanted brewing systems and who cannot keep up with demand / who has by far the bigger cut of social media exposure…. and who is relying on “dictatorships” to keep their product mentions going.
What are the “dirty wars” and what has some of members of forums and groups out there all upset? Well the KK/KL wars are spilling onto the streets - it started about 2 months ago with back chatter of customers, especially of Keg Land, being “attacked” by Keg King employees on forums and social media to the extent they had posts deleted or membership cancelled for no apparent reason. It’s only in the past few days hanging around here and noticing some “famous faces” has it caused a few of us to discuss what on earth is going on - and then I heard a few stories and proof of what really is going on.
Now I don’t mind some corporate argy-bargy, some friendly fire and smaller home-brew shops grumbling back in 2018 of having to adjust to the realities of “$100 co2 bottles and $50 refills…. “ but what if things get really, really nasty? How does one “trap a corporate troller” in 2022 with their pants down?
Enter the (often called by even current followers) dictatorship of Home Brewing Australia (no - not AHB!) Yes sure, they allow the occasional KL puff piece by some of the big social media identities out there but if you look closer at many posts there seems to be an odd number of KK regulators, spunders, Apollos….. and members with “Keg King” in their names. As they say about birds… a group of us started to think is this a Keg King hive,
a brew industry Borg???
For the non-trekkies -
Borg - Wikipedia
But how to draw them out? Easy -
Keg King bait. KK have had a hard time recently with some not too successful product - plastic disposable kegs, spunds that clog easily with Kveik, and of course the “switch” from Guten to Grainfather (ouch!). Self caused problems nothing of Keg Lands fault (ok, the Generation 4 Brewzilla killed Guten). A few innocent posts here and there and out they come…. led by no other than the current Keg King Operations Manager aka look up his name on LinkedIn (and from what we saw, abetted by several Keg King retail staff). The pile on was fast - we suspect Keg King uses some kind of media monitor system to alert them of any mention of their product. In a week we saw 5 members “killed off” in that manner under the help of HBA’s mods - which we suspect are part of the hive.
The accusation every time? These killed off members were Kegland staff; hell one was accused of being Kee himself! Analysing the posts there was no evidence of a direct attack on Keg King product, just a normal observation a typical home brewer would make. However we did notice 3 of the members were members of other ‘books and posters that evidently were KL customers (one of them was a regular KK customer too though - figure that out)?
This is a very sad state of affairs and goes to show Keg King staff are openly attacking home brewers out there! And there are forums and ‘books out there taking sides.
We’ve kept the proof (in some instances the mods could not delete the evidence fast enough, but we caught it) - might make a nice story for a newspaper or ACA…. ar least one of those IT blogs that goes after corporate bullies. Of course Facebook is investigating, advising our IT expert that ‘book is under investigation regardless (there was a heap of discontent a few weeks ago spinning around).
I wonder what Aran B. thinks? Can’t be good for sales
