The best beer account on instagram

Beer Instagram can be thin gruel. It’s got reams and reams of the same stuff - pictures of cans, pictures of beer glasses, pictures of people with cans and overflowing beer glasses; images of dingy orange beer, put through a filter to make it more orange; adverts for beer; pub exteriors, pub interiors - and not much else. (I’m as guilty as anyone else).

Mona

You could scroll for weeks without seeing anything genuinely interesting. It’s like twitter, except at least on that website there’s normally some snark or spat to spice up the monotony. Everyone’s on their best behaviour on instagram, which may be why it’s so monotonous. 

Occasionally, though, the monotony is broken - by delightful shots of the countryside (particularly from Teresa Undine and Laurence Creamer) and by accounts like London Craft Beer Faces, which does exactly what it promises: it shows some faces of people who work in craft beer in London.

I don’t know exactly why, but this is very appealing. It’s good to see faces, where you’re not being sold anything. It’s certainly nice to see smiling faces. It’s a window into the engine room of London’s current beer boom, a world populated by young people, many of them drawn from around Europe, from Italy or Poland, for example, as well as Britain. People like Viktorija Vainilaityte, the 27-year-old Lithuanian whose account it is.

The account, she says, is an attempt to put people at the centre of beer. “Most beer blogs feature either pubs or beer but there's never people, really,” she says. She was inspired by her friend Gabriele Bertucci, who spent much of lockdown producing ‘What’s In The Glass?’, highlighting the problems pubs and bars have faced since March. “I really loved it,” she says. “So I thought, yeah, I might give it a go as well.

Ziyad

 “It's a nice way to feature certain people because I think that craft beer is not just beer-beer. People have a big role in it as well … I started doing it more for me as a chance, after lockdown, to go and see people I haven't seen for a while and visit places.”

Viktorija has been working in the London craft beer industry for six years, having arrived in the city to study illustration ten years ago. She started at Strongroom, and has since worked for Brick Lane bottle shop Kill The Cat and Mother Kelly’s en route to Barworks; she’s assistant general manager at The Well and Bucket in Bethnal Green Road now. 

The images, she says, are of her friends. There’s no rhyme or reason to how they’re picked. “So far, it's been just people I've bumped into, and most of them I know from before,” she says. “ I might be cycling around [and] I've just popped into some places if I have time. 

“It just doesn't matter, woman, man, black, or white, whatever. One of the questions I ask people is, ‘who shall I talk to next?’ So now I've got a massive list to go through at some point, including quite a few people I don't know.”