Session #103: The hard stories are about more than beer

The SessionOops. The Session #103: “The Hard Stuff” kind of snuck up on me.

Natasha Godard at MetaCookBook’s marching orders include two parts:
– What do you want people in beer culture to be talking about that we’re not?
– What do you have to say on the topic(s)?

Reading Boak & Bailey’s contibution this morning first reminded me that I’d totally forgotten what day it was, and second led me to realize I jumped the gun last week when I asked, “Is gentrification good for more expensive beer?”

“More expensive beer” being code for “craft beer” and that is part of a larger question: Does that entity people call craft beer have a different role in society than beer has had for the last 200 years (or 50 years, or 400 years, you pick)? It is certainly related to the hypothetical book Maureen Ogle wrote she’d write (if she were writing one).

But, here’s the thing, that’s a big topic, one that requires research, and supporting statements with facts. Granted, I’m a bit obsessive, so coming up with the first question is relatively easy; committing to the “what do you have to say” before I’ve collected the facts is a non-starter.

Beer does not need to be a vehicle for “doing good,” but it gets extra credit when it does (as I started typing this sentence a tweet from James Schirmer buzzed on my phone, pointing to one such story). It’s easy to find stories when there are press releases and press conferences. It’s also more fun to write the feel good stories, the brewer who started out working as a server at the local brewpub who gets pour the first beer she wrote a recipe for.

But would be better if a hard question or two were asked, and answered. For instance, how many stories have you read about the role a brewpub (or several of them) played in upgrading a neighborhood? How many of them included anything about the people who used to live there? There’s a difference between improving a neighborhood and improving a community.

(I promise to feel guilty the rest of the day for not writing a post that actually tackles the hard stuff, but it’s a long way home and I have a plane to catch.)

7 thoughts on “Session #103: The hard stories are about more than beer”

  1. Did craft beer play a different role in society 200 years ago? You didn’t define craft beer, and as I understand the term that didn’t exist before 1980. But did beer play a different role? OMG, yes! At least in the Nordic countries. The research on that is done. It’s just going to take a while to publish. The backlog of posts on my blog is now more than 20 so..,

  2. Lars – Feel free to email me those posts in a zip file. I can’t wait to read them.

    What I am wondering is if beer is a force for social change, and if what’s known as the craft segment is different.

  3. Thank you, Stan, but they’re not actually written. Just queued up. It’s things I did during the summer, bits from my book (in Norwegian) etc.

    Is beer a force for social change now? I don’t know. In the past it was a powerful social force, and even more than that, but back then it wasn’t really a driver for change. Unless you accept the beer side of the “bread or beer” debate. It could be different now, though.

  4. I don’t think you can consider craft beer’s place separately from the larger trends in gentrification. There are two, sometimes opposing, dominant views in the gentrification literature; one side tends to focus on the economic causes and effects, and the other focuses on the cultural causes and effects. The latter focuses on the consumption of this “new middle class,” how they reject the blandness of suburbia and imprint their own identities on neighborhoods that were once off-limits to them.

    It’s fueled in part by racism/exoticism, as the “new middle class” is mostly white and the displaced populations are mostly minority. I think the search for “authenticity” is related, whatever that means. I’ve heard it used as an impetus for gentrification (move to the parts of the cities with a soul) but it also seems like in doing so, the gentrifiers destroy whatever authenticity existed, replaced by the same kind of bland, sameness they fled the suburbs to avoid in the first place.

    I see craft beer today occupying largely the same consumption space for the “new middle class” that wine occupied for the old middle class: its consumption is not meant to democratize, but to demarcate.

  5. I thought this might be relevant. Pulling data from Mediamark (which is a very large marketing research company) shows a perhaps unsurprising portrait of craft beer consumers. The only craft companies big enough to have their own category are Sierra Nevada and Boston Beer, but I’d be surprised if small locals/regionals have substantially different consumers.

    The way the Mediamark stats work, is, based upon a single factor, how likely is it that the consumer would purchase the brand in question compared to the general population. So for instance, just knowing that a person is a man, that makes them 62% more likely to buy Sierra Nevada. If you’re a woman, you’re 58% less likely.

    Sierra Nevada stats:
    M +62%
    W -58%
    Post-grad +60%
    College +102%
    High school -68%
    Management/business/finance occupation +146%

    Household Income brackets:
    $150k+ +85%
    $75-149k +74%
    $60-74k +5%
    $50-59k -50%
    40-49 -47%
    30-39 -46%
    20-29 -62%
    <20k -86%

    White +21%
    Black -95%
    American Indian -100%
    Asian +49%
    Other -71%

    Spanish spoken in home -2%

    Top magazine subscriptions for SN drinkers:
    Cigar Aficionado +340%
    The New Yorker +335%
    Yoga Journal +335%
    HuffingtonPost.com +306%
    Sunset Magazine +279%
    Bicycling Magazine +238%
    Wall Street Journal +196%
    Mother Earth News +178%

    Boston Beer looks pretty much the same, though their ethnic demo is different.
    White +19%
    Black -66%
    American Indian -47%
    Asian -18%
    Other -59%
    Spanish spoken in home -46%

    • Nate – Thanks for understanding just what my concerns are and for doing a little digging. Very intreresting data.

  6. As someone who has seen a few beer cycles since the 70’s, I’d say that beer appreciation in the sense anyone reading here would understand is always different than the wider market’s take. In the 70’s, the mass of people were satisfied with mass-marketed brands, brands their friends ordered, or they saw on tv or in advertising.

    Enthusiasts with an interest beyond the norm sought out imports, rare brands still produced (porter, say). The downtown business crowd then favoured Becks or Heineken. A beer enthusiast drank them too but worried about light struck and overage…

    Later, in Ontario, a beer like Labatt Classic, an all-malt lager sold in a green bottle but with a restrained palate, sold well amongst the mid-town business crowd, probably the suburban one too. It was the Sam Adams of the time. The beer enthusiast tried this but also sought out Labatt IPA which never had the same cachet but had a much older history. He made trips to Buffalo and bought Yuengling Lord Chesterfield Ale and Ballantine IPA.

    Then craft beers came and some of these were adopted by the middle class aspirational crowd, Creemore is a good example. Today, I’d guess Stella Artois has the place Labatt Classic did and more probably, and yes the younger crowd ask for “IPA” or a “dark beer not too bitter” or a “sour” perhaps because it is of the moment just as a style of jeans or car is.

    But this has nothing to do with the real beer fan. The real beer fan, of whatever background, stands apart. In my time I’ve met people from grandees (think of Maytag) to professionals to labourers who share the passion for beer.

    It’s not really the beer itself that drives the wider market in other words, it’s fashion, habit, circumstance. In the 50’s and 60’s, the working people in the U.K. drank much better beer (bitter and mild) than aspirants toying with newfangled lager much less keg beer. It’s switched around now, but the same logic holds in the sense that very understandably, people with less disposable income will purchase the more economical product.

    And that leads to my second point, which is that SN and SA’s beers simply cost more, or they did when they were establishing their market shares. I once asked some friends in Kentucky who worked in a distillery why I didn’t see more craft beer in the local bars and they said it wasn’t that people didn’t know about them or want to try them but they cost more. Now that SN’s prices, for example, are much more reasonable compared to the typical Bud Light price, one can expect SN’s type of beer will gain in popularity. It was like this with Anheuser Busch’s Budweiser. Introduced and marketed as a premium beer, it later became a popular one. Economies of scale and transportation improvements helped make the beer accessible to most everyone.

    Gary

Comments are closed.