There were many words spilled over beer last week, including some from Jeff Alworth related to one of my favorite topics: authenticity. He even headlines a phrase, “authenticity trap,” that I almost always have to explain during conversations with brewers.
In his post he leans to a passage in which “Holt demonstrates how iconic brands exude authenticity by encompassing political and cultural authority as resources for self-expression.” I’m pretty sure that is Douglas Holt, a marketing consultant who along with his partner Douglas Cameron, was responsible for the tagline “Follow your folly, ours is beer,” that New Belgium Brewing used for more than a decade.
In 2003, Holt and Cameron created a commercial that features a character they called The Tinkerer, who finds an old bicycle at a garage sale, carefully restores it, and then happily rides it into the Colorado countryside.
They outline their strategy for New Belgium in a chapter called “Fat Tire: Crossing the Cultural Chasm” within their book, “Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands.” As well as Fat Tire, those brands include Nike, Jack Daniels, Patagonia and others. The word authentic comes up in most chapters, but usually as a given and without a definition of what it means to be authentic. What is clear is how important whatever they label authenticity is to those focused on marketing.
I find the book “Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music” more useful in understanding what might be viewed as authentic. The authors suggest thinking in terms of what they call representational authenticity, cultural authenticity and personal authenticity. Four years ago, when Boak & Bailey put out a call for #BeeryLongReads2020, I wrote about this idea as it related to an authenticity in beer discussion that was going on at the time.
Some days, I must admit, this all comes into clearer focus than others.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“When you look at these things that are lauded as best, either on beer lists, or books, or AFI, you want to find the strain of things of what makes them good or high quality. It really keys you into this idea of what we collectively value. What things are worthy of being valued? I think that the art of commentary takes on its own art form that is reflective of the culture.”
— Alex Kidd
From Fresno to Famous: Alex Kidd Brings Life To Beer by Andy Crouch in All About Beer.
LEDE OF THE WEEK
What is the wayside? You fall by the wayside, it is the act of decline or of becoming a pariah within oneself. The wayside is where you will find me, said the man with the jocular grin and eyes like bullets and a life shattered into pieces. There can be two interpretations of drinking by the wayside. The first one is the act of falling through the cracks in the society in which you live and spending your time drinking and drinking until alcoholism sprays its pestilence over you. This is the wayside in which sobriety is a stranger and intoxication a hand-holding broken angel.
Then there is another kind of wayside drinking, the act of surprise and choosing spontaneity and spinning the wheel and taking a chance and coming upon a pub you have never seen before and going inside without much hope that you will find something to drink that makes you wish upon a star. However, you choose well for this wayside pub is gorgeous in its reality and earthiness; the locals growl with friendliness rather than aggression and the staff help themselves to your custom with pleasant ease. There is a beer that you adore being served and so you settle down for an hour or two, occasionally joining in the conversations and laughing with the rest of them or you are left alone to take your book into the corner and now and again lift up thine eyes and hear a selection of joined up words that speak of the assurance of the pub. This is the kind of wayside drinking I will always pick, the choice of chance and of course you do know that you will never come to this pub ever again.
From Version by the Wayside in ATJbeerpubs
LISTICLE OF THE WEEK (AND PERHAPS THE YEAR)
“My Favourite Beers in the World”
From Pete Brown
YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY
– Let’s be careful out there. Non-alcoholic beers, great idea. Draft NABs, well, maybe not. I know brewers who choose not even to drink hop water on draft, let alone non-alcoholic beer. Hops provide microbial stability, but not protection from pathogens.
– A journey through time rather than in space. “Each chapter (in “Around the World in 80 Beers”) starts by looking at one contemporary beer, across more than 40 different countries, from Norway to New Zealand and China to Brazil, and uses that beer as a springboard to talk about the history of the beer style that beer represents, the history of brewing in that country and the history of that brewery.”
– American Craft Beer Hall of Fame. Has the time come? The ACBHOF is the vision of Marty Nachel, and the inaugural class of inductees will enshrined in the fall. A bit of disclosure: I’m a member of the board of advisors (one over many).
– A zero sum game? “With anti-alcohol rhetoric ratcheting up on the daily, is the industry closer to or farther from finding an effective, unified response?”
– Somebody didn’t get the message craft is dead. Bay Area breweries will open at least 9 new taprooms this year.
– Cask map. Where to look in NYC.
Man, that first definition of “falling by the wayside” is pretty harsh… I’ve always understood the expression to be referring to something/someone that hasn’t kept up with a race or progress or the times or whatever. Not sure that falling into personal ruin/uncontrolled alcoholism enters into the picture.
Authenticity — I guess I’ve been influenced by your “beer from a place” definition in terms of authenticity. Folks who work to pay homage to beer from a place — say, Dovetail, the brewery that Jenny Pfafflin (quoted in your longread article you wrote/linked to) now brews for and that is inspired by a number of European models — if they’re satisfied with the efforts and the beer tastes good, I’m no longer considering “authenticity” in terms of enjoyment and just happy they’re brewing awesome beers. Their “kolsch-style” (or dubbel or Baltic porter or or or) may or may not be authentic based on one or more of the many possible definitions in your essay, but it’s/they’re a fantastic way to experience something awesome outside of actually being in the places where “authentic” kolsch/etc. are brewed. Same goes for other breweries that follow older models. For those coming up with beers in what we now consider to be US-based styles or versions, does authenticity even matter? Is something where the “classic” versions are forty or twenty or ten or five years old actually old enough to be “authentic”? Better to just enjoy them.
I do like the concepts of various types of authenticity as it pertains to performed music, and it’s always fun to debate whether folks who love a genre and work to keep it going fall in terms of authenticity. If I were drinking beer now, I’d probably start doing it here, so I guess it’s good for readers that I’m not!
Thanks, Bill. I appreciate that Dovetail makes a point of using traditional brewing methods only because they think those produce beer with the flavors the want (to produce and drink). I doubly appreciate that on the front page they state “We make beer for the fine tradition of hanging out.”
I appreciate “Faking It’ because it reminds us of what is lost if we exclude music/beer/whatever because it does not adhere to somebody’s definition of authentic.