Does a small brewery need a marketing coordinator?

Not at first. A taproom-only brewery can often run on the owner plus a bartender who posts a few times a week, as long as reviews get answered and Google Business stays current. A coordinator starts to pay off when events and private rentals become a real revenue line and nobody has the hours to sell them.

What does a brewery events coordinator do?

A brewery events coordinator keeps the public events calendar, books and runs private events, answers rental inquiries, books trivia hosts, bands and food trucks, and makes sure the bar knows what is happening each night. At many breweries the same person also posts to social media, which is why the role is often a hybrid events and marketing job.

How much does an events coordinator make?

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a national median of $61,160 a year, or $29.41 an hour, for meeting, convention and event planners (SOC 13-1121) in its May 2025 wage survey. The 10th percentile was $36,830 and the 90th was $101,700. These figures cover all industries, so brewery pay can differ.

How much does a marketing coordinator make?

BLS does not publish a separate marketing coordinator title. The closest code, market research analysts and marketing specialists (SOC 13-1161), had a national median of $78,760 a year, or $37.87 an hour, in May 2025. Public relations specialists (27-3031), where much social media work is classified, had a median of $74,750.

Should brewery marketing be one job or two?

At most breweries under a few thousand barrels it starts as one hybrid job, because neither events nor social media fills 40 hours alone. Split it when private-event sales need someone answering inquiries and running bookings most days, and move the daily posting, replies and texts to someone else or to an outside service.

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Who Runs Marketing at a Brewery Your Size? Roles, Hours and Pay

By Brian Winckel · Founder, Brewlytics.ai

Operator7 min readNovember 3, 2026Outcome: Decide which marketing and events jobs your brewery needs covered each week, who should own each one at your stage, and what that person is likely to cost.

A brewery owner with a grey beard and a woman in a dark henley talk over coffee mugs at a wooden table in an empty taproom, with a closed laptop between them and fermenters behind a glass wall.

Short Answer

Most breweries start with the owner and a bartender covering marketing, then hire one hybrid events-and-marketing coordinator, then add outside help for social and texts, and only later split into separate roles. BLS puts the national median at $61,160 a year for event planners and $78,760 for marketing specialists (May 2025, all industries). Decide by listing the weekly jobs and naming one owner for each.

Barley's Take

If everybody runs the Instagram, nobody runs the Instagram. Give every job one name, even if it's the same name twice.

Why This Matters for Breweries

On a craft beer professionals forum this fall, an owner of a brewery doing about 1,200 barrels and $1 million in gross sales, with a private rental space, asked a simple question: what does your events and marketing team look like, how many people, and what do they do? A few weeks later another thread asked what breweries pay their social media or event manager, and whether it's hourly or flat.

Those are good questions, but most breweries hire a title ("we need a marketing person") before they know which jobs that person will own. Then the new hire spends Tuesday posting a Hazy IPA can shot, Wednesday answering a rental inquiry, and Thursday hanging string lights for trivia, and nobody answers the 2-star Google review from Saturday.

A team structure is just a list of weekly jobs with one name next to each. Get that list right and the hiring question mostly answers itself.

How It Works

The weekly jobs

A mirrorless camera, a coil of edison party lights, a small wireless microphone, a face-down phone, a roll of gaffer tape and an empty pint glass on a stainless workbench in a brewery cellar.

Before you think about people, list the work. At most taprooms it's these seven jobs:

Job	What it covers	Who usually owns it first
Social posts	New releases, events, the room, the people, a few times a week or daily	A bartender, then the coordinator
Replies and reviews	Comments, DMs, Google and Yelp reviews	The owner, often late at night
Google Business Profile	Hours, photos, events, posts	Whoever set it up years ago
Texts and email	Release alerts, event reminders, the mug club	Nobody, or the owner once a month
Events calendar	Trivia, music, food trucks, releases	The taproom manager
Private-event sales	Inquiries, tours, contracts, deposits	The owner or taproom manager
Website	Hours, tap list, events page, rental page	The owner's friend who built it

The jobs at the bottom need someone on site. The jobs at the top can be done from anywhere.

Four stages of a brewery marketing team

Stage 1: owner plus a bartender. The owner handles reviews and the website, a bartender who likes photography posts a few times a week, and the taproom manager runs the events calendar. This works for a small taproom as long as two things don't slip: reviews get answered and Google Business stays current.

Stage 2: one hybrid events-and-marketing coordinator. This is the first real hire at most breweries. Neither social media nor events fills 40 hours a week on its own at a small brewery, so the job combines them. The coordinator owns the calendar, the posts and, often, private-event inquiries. The risk is that events always win, because a band arriving at 6 pm is louder than a post that didn't go out.

Stage 3: coordinator plus outside help. The coordinator keeps everything that needs a body in the room (events, private bookings, photos of the space) and hands the daily, repeatable work (posting, replies, texts and email, Google Business) to a freelancer or a service. This is usually where a brewery with a rental space and a busy events calendar ends up.

Stage 4: a small team. Separate events and marketing roles, sometimes a marketing manager over both, and sometimes a sales rep for distribution. That shape fits a production brewery more than a taproom.

What the roles pay, from BLS

BLS doesn't publish brewery-specific salaries for these jobs, so use the national all-industry figures from its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, May 2025, the latest release:

BLS occupation (SOC code)	Closest brewery role	Median per year	Median per hour	10th to 90th percentile
Meeting, convention and event planners (13-1121)	Events coordinator	$61,160	$29.41	$36,830 to $101,700
Market research analysts and marketing specialists (13-1161)	Marketing coordinator	$78,760	$37.87	$43,390 to $155,480
Public relations specialists (27-3031)	Social media coordinator	$74,750	$35.94	$44,110 to $135,150
Marketing managers (11-2021)	Marketing manager	$166,790	$80.19	$90,260 to $293,610

Two cautions. These medians include large companies in big cities, so a taproom in a small town will often pay toward the lower end. And BLS has no "social media coordinator" title; that work is spread across several codes, so the public relations line is the nearest match, not an exact one.

For context on the bar side, the same survey put the national median for bartenders (35-3011) at $16.51 an hour. When a bartender "also does the Instagram," you're buying marketing at bar rates, which is why it rarely gets done consistently.

Example Brewery Scenario

On a sunny brewery patio in late afternoon, a woman in a flannel shirt crouches to photograph a four-beer tasting flight on a wooden paddle with a mirrorless camera.

Copper Hollow Brewing (a fictional brewery) brews about 1,200 barrels a year on a 10-barrel system, pours a Pilsner, a West Coast IPA called Switchback and a rotating Hazy IPA, runs Square in the taproom and rents a 50-seat loft for parties.

For two years, marketing was the owner and a bartender named Dana. Dana posted when she had time. The owner answered reviews at midnight. Loft inquiries sat in Instagram DMs for days.

The owner wrote down the seven jobs and found that private events were bringing in real money but nobody owned the sales. So they promoted Dana to a full-time events-and-marketing coordinator at $26 an hour, below the BLS event-planner median of $29.41 and well above the bar rate, and wrote her job description around three things: the events calendar, loft bookings, and photos of the space.

Six months later, the loft was booked most Fridays, but posts and texts had slipped again. So the owner moved the daily posting, comment replies, review responses and the weekly release text to an outside service, with one rule: any event inquiry gets flagged to Dana the same day. Dana now spends her week on events, loft bookings and photos of the space.

Practical Checklist

Barley adjusts a microphone stand on a small wooden stage in the corner of a brewery taproom before trivia night, while a bartender wipes a table in the background.

Write down the seven weekly jobs and put one name next to each.
Circle any job with no name, or with "everyone."
Split the list into on-site jobs (events, bookings, photos) and remote jobs (posts, replies, texts, Google Business).
Estimate the hours each job takes in a normal week, and in December.
Check what your private events and event nights bring in before you price a hire.
Compare any pay offer to the BLS medians above, adjusted for your town.
Write the job description around jobs, not a title.
Decide which remote jobs you'd hand to outside help first.
Set one rule for inquiries: who gets them, and how fast.

For how these jobs fit into a full marketing plan, see the brewery marketing guide, and for pricing the event space your coordinator sells, see how to price and book private events.

How Brewlytics Helps

A busy brewery taproom on a Thursday release night, with groups crowding long wooden tables over pints of hazy IPA and stout while a bartender pours under pendant lights.

Our brewery marketing service takes the remote jobs off the list, so your coordinator can stay on events and private bookings.

Daily posts and engagement. A post every day on up to four social accounts, with replies to comments and DMs, and nothing posted without your approval.
Inquiries flagged to your team. Private-event and rental inquiries go to the person who books them rather than getting answered by us.
Texts and email, written for you. Release alerts and event reminders to guests who opted in.
Google Business Profile kept current, plus website SEO, and guest data from Square so you can see who your regulars are.

FAQ

See the schema-ready FAQ block at the end of the page for the full set.

Ready to Give Every Job One Owner?

Your coordinator's hours are worth more selling the loft and running trivia than writing captions at 11 pm. Book a demo to see how we handle the daily marketing for breweries, or see how Brewlytics works for breweries.

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