Is this just another sign of the globalization of beer?
The Washington Post has a story about “Belgium’s upstart innovators,” which of course prominently features De Struise Brouwers — a lightning rod when you talk about “new wave” brewers.
In the story, Wendy Littlefield of Vanberg & Dewulf, one of the first companies to import Belgian beers, expresses the concern about the “noise” these beers generate that’s been discussed at length in comments here.
Littlefield worries that these “extreme” brewers, who represent only a small fraction of the Belgian beer market, are overshadowing the traditionalists — or worse. Struise and [Picobrouwerij] Alvinne, she says, “really, arguably, are hurting the very culture that they claim to be arising out of.”
No arguing that if you disregard the international pale lagers that 90 percent or so of the world’s beer drinkers consume that more brewers outside of Belgium are fermenting beer with yeast taken from Belgium and that more brewers outside the United States are making hops from the American northwest a prominent part of the flavor and aroma in their beers.
Does the out-of-balance attention heaped on these beers, particularly the often out-of-balance ones, endanger traditional* beers?
* “Traditional” is no more easily defined that “craft,” so let’s not start.
This would be a different sort of globalization of beer tastes. (In the first round, those international pale lagers swept aside local breweries.) The parallel in wine, where Two Buck Chuck and Yellow Tail are signs of globalization, isn’t exactly parallel. But Mike Veseth’s discussion of “disruption” in Wine Wars does provoke the same questions beer drinkers might have.
Veseth draws upon two political economists, starting with Joseph Schumpeter and the well known concept of creative destruction: the “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” He also points to Karl Polanyi’s theory of the “double movement.”
So a dialetic is unleashed, which is the heart of the double movement. Economic change (the first movement) provokes social reaction (the second movement) and it is the combination of the two that pushes economy and society forward. The future is not just one movement but both in a continuing dynamic interaction.
Take a deep breath. It is only beer. His point is that there are always going to be new products, new producers, new technologies and — this is important — new consumers with different tastes. But how those whose interests are threatened react will also determine the future of beer.
