The Cultural Triumph of Craft Beer
People drink IPA, not Bud Light, when gazing out from the Space Needle.
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The sad news that Portland Brewing is closing in a month is another echo, as if we needed one, of the troubles the brewing industry faces in early 2021. Even before Covid arrived, people had grown morose about beer. Consumption has been down for decades, and the craft segment has been roughly flat for a couple years. Worse, those regional breweries that fueled the rise of craft brewing have been struggling, some closing or selling out, others spurning beer for flavored malt beverages or seltzer. Oh yes, seltzer. It’s meteoric growth, becoming as large in three years as craft beer did in three decades, has created a sense of dread I’ve never seen before. While the volume growth hasn’t come at the expense of IPAs and Italian pilsners, it looms there like a bad omen.
And yet. One nice thing about being old is that I was around for a lot of the craft beer era. I started drinking beer, admittedly illegally, around the time Portland Brewing was founded, and my first encounter with “microbrew” came a year later. That span of time, an even 35 years, is a great frame to consider the change craft beer brought. Measured by dollars or barrels, it seems modest. Somewhere around 80% of the beer sold in the US is one form of mass market lager or another, though it does account for about a quarter of the dollars earned on beer. That’s good but hardly world-beating, and it’s the metric we most often use to assess its impact.
But culturally, it has been delivered seismic change. The world we inhabit has gone through a complete transformation in those 35 years.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, craft beer had no presence outside bars, and very little presence in them. Bars themselves were different beasts—small, smoky affairs, often dingy and disreputable. There were nicer places, of course, but these weren’t always receptive venues for early craft breweries. Rob and Kurt Widmer told many amusing tales about early accounts when I interviewed them for The Widmer Way. It was a different world, as Kurt describes here:
“Initially we thought it had to be a little more white-collar, downtown-Portland, more skewed younger. Then by the late 80s we realized we could go into a blue-collar place, pure blue collar, where the guy’s been sitting there since five o’clock in the morning. So they have eight taps and all you get is one. But it didn’t have to be their number one beer, but as long as it wasn’t their number eight beer, they were delighted.”
This was the state of affairs thirty-five years ago. If you wanted one of those newfangled micros, you had to do some hunting, and if you did find a handle, there’d be only one—the three, five, or eight other taps would be various brands of mass market lagers. (In Oregon at the time, we had several regional breweries, which accounted for why a pub might have eight handles—in most cities four were ample.) If it was Widmer Hefeweizen, you got a wheat beer. If it was Portland Ale, you got a cream ale. That was your selection: macro or whatever micro was pouring.
Americans had no idea that beer styles existed. “Beer” didn’t come in flavors, beer was the flavor. Here in Portland, a transition began early, thanks largely to the growing popularity of brewpubs. People interested in good beer realized brewpubs offered more than one flavor, and they became the medium for exploration. Within ten years, The city had developed real beer culture, but it was constrained in so many ways. The very presence of craft beer seemed to bring dazzling variety—now instead of a single choice there were four or maybe six (!) different types. We felt very daring drinking our black ales. And by the standards of a decade earlier, things had changed. Now there were beer fests and several breweries, and a growing number of people who knew what IPA, porter, and pale ale was.
Yet it was like beer culture kindergarten compared with the world we now inhabit. Where the average bar might have had six taps 35 years ago, today it will have a dozen at a minimum, and more likely twenty or more. Where all but one of the taps was devoted to mass market lagers then, none of the taps are devoted to them now. This isn’t always true nationwide, but no matter where you go, even at the bleakest airport or hotel or chainiest of restaurants, the majority of taps will be within the craft segment. The kinds of people who never dreamed of drinking beer in 1986 now occasionally have a nice saison or witbier. In fact, if you drink beer now, you almost certainly drink craft beer at least some of the time.
Beer used to be considered déclassé, beneath the attention of polite society. Now it’s served in every good restaurant. Big companies had enough money to keep craft out of expensive sports and entertainment venues, but it became too popular and ballparks and stadiums had to start offering it. Beer has also seeped into venues it never appeared before like movie theaters. Grocery stores and gas stations sell growlers. Beer is everywhere, and that beer is overwhelmingly the various varieties of craft beer.
Finally, drinkers are so much more sophisticated now. We beer fans may overestimate the average drinker’s knowledge of terpenes or fermentation techniques, but grab a typical pubgoer and send them back in time and they’d know more than most “experts” did in 1986. As we are painfully aware, craft beer is still too often the domain of Whites, and places to drink beer are sometimes comically white White spaces. Yet the breadth of diversity among drinkers has expanded hugely. We wouldn’t think a thing about a pair of women walking into a pub and ordering pints now. In 1986 that would have been quite a sight. It’s hard to imagine we were ever that retrograde, and that itself is a measure of how much things have changed.
Portland Brewing closed down in part because it helped successfully transform the world. Beers like MacTarnahan’s were considered flavor-bombs in their time, but they were approachable enough that tens of thousands of Portlanders gave up their Rainiers and Blitzes—or Chablis—for them.
I have no idea what the future holds. The nature of life is change. Yet whether the culture moves away from beer or, after this pause, dives in more deeply, it doesn’t change the monumental societal changes that have happened since Portland Brewing starting trying to get bars to carry their beer three and a half decades ago. Sometimes you have to look down to see how high you’ve climbed.