(Escondido, CA) – It has certainly been a fruitful 24 hours for those covering Stone Brewing Company. Blogging about blogging is generally lame but, in light of what just happened, this post may or may not provide some extra context. Around the time of that episode, we also learned about a tiff with another online beer publication, The Full Pint, which bears reporting.

A recent interpretation of California growler law leaves the door open for breweries to accept any fillable growler as long as they have a label approval for that growler size and can slap their own brewery marking on it (to our knowledge, that is how it works). Some breweries chose not to go all the way and fill any growler for a number of reasons so there have been mixed reactions abound. Stone Brewing hasn’t made a public decision yet on a growler policy.

TFP recently posted what one could easily perceive as a snarky, baiting post about what Stone may decide to do with a controversial poll.

Stone didn’t sit tight or ignore it. In response, the company went arguably out of its way to create a webpage mocking TFP with elements of the actual TFP site, making its stance on such a poll clear. And tweeting out the link.

The growler decision, however, will wait.

It is one of the first times that we can recall where a brewery has done such a thing, warranted or not. Publishers can usually lay claim to checking the power of subjects they cover but it is rare to see it in the reverse. Especially a company that is around the ballpark of $100 million in annual revenue checking the power of a part-time publisher.

And it gets a little more complicated in 2013 when some breweries and beer companies have larger media distribution than independent publishers. We would argue that it is more important than ever to preserve that independent tier of publishers.

Breweries and publishers have generally played quite nicely in this community, sometimes or oftentimes, with needed financial disclosures missing and non-financial disclosures (such as personal relationships with subjects) omitted. Omissions are inevitably going to be the case here and with any publisher covering a niche to which they have close ties (covering events, meeting subjects in person, etc).

What will be interesting to watch is whether publishers that wish to report the truth and conduct acts of journalism on all aspects of this niche will be rewarded for their efforts or penalized. And whether publications ( yes, like this one) will return that respect to those we cover.

Perhaps the last 24 hours is evidence that both sides can probably do a better job of serving you, the reader (and consumer).