What if The Craft Beer Story is Wrong?
Cover photo and above are stills from Brewmance
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I was about halfway through the new craft beer documentary Brewmance when I had that feeling of waking up during a dream that doesn’t quite make sense. The movie spins a fine tale about two Long Beach, CA start-ups and their separate journeys founding a brewery. In both cases, the principals are homebrewers who must overcome various challenges and obstacles to realize their goals.
The director, Christo Brock, is talented, and the film is beautiful and professional. He managed to track down a number of beer luminaries like Ken Grossman, Charlie Papazian, Jim Koch, and Sam Calagione, and they give context about beer and the brewing industry. For anyone who has read about American craft brewing or seen similar movies, it’s a familiar story about a movement founded on grit, self-reliance, and rebellion. We repeat the events like they describe straight history, but with each repetition, the storytellers inevitably infuse the narrative with more and more mythic elements. As I watched the movie move through this hoary tale, I began to question if it was ever really accurate.
No Revolution?
In broad strokes, the story goes like this: soulless industrial giants dominated beer for generations, streamlining the product into a single, indistinguishable commodity. A hardy band of dissidents brought back a more handmade approach to brewing, and with it flavor and choice, and in the process smashed the dominance of the corporate titans. It was a unique revolution, one characterized by the daring and tenacity of the early pioneers.
When we zoom in tightly and listen to the stories of those pioneers, the contours seem to emerge organically, inevitably. That was their experience, and there’s a lot of truth in it. Yet there’s another, less epic way to tell the story.
Like other industries, brewing harnessed modern technology to streamline production, make it far more efficient, and drive costs down with the benefits of scale. A post-war infatuation with packaging created a gee-whiz revolution in food that allowed consistent, long-lasting manufactured goods to go out on trucks to supermarkets, where they remained shelf-stable for months. Velveeta replaced fresh cheddar; instant coffee supplanted beans; cans and frozen products displaced fresh, perishable vegetables and meats. Even whole meals, cooked in lightning-fast microwaves, placed families in front of TV sets with just minutes of prep. Beer, of course, followed suit.
In the 1980s, consumers hungering for flavor rather than convenience and low expense found their way back to fresh and handcrafted foods. Far from being unique to beer, this trend visited every food and beverage category. Much like the early craft brewers, small businesspeople created artisanal cheeses and good coffee and “gourmet” cookies; they eschewed McDonald’s for “slow food”; they started farmers markets and sold strawberries and arugula at the peak of ripeness. Risk-takers led all of those start-ups. They were part of a creative force Marx described all the way back in the middle of the 19th century: “a great part not only of existing production, but also of previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed.” To makers of shelf-stable “cheese food” (quite an innovation!), artisanal makers of aged blue cheeses probably looked like the barbarians at the gate.
More than that, the cycle of brewery consolidation and flourishing that characterize the previous and current eras is one that goes back a thousand years. Breweries making funky, spoilable ales in the areas around Bremen and Hamburg complained about the new hopped ales coming from “giant” breweries there. In a recent Beervana Show, we discussed how Berlin, once a vibrant hub of characterful local brewing, slowly devolved into a place where far fewer breweries were making far less interesting beer before, recently, rebounding with the excitement of small new breweries. Sound familiar?
In a different narrative, we might intuit a similar pattern just by looking at brewery numbers. A robust market at the end of the 19th century declined during the temperance movement, and was seriously crippled by Prohibition. In the 1940s, healthier survivors began gobbling up weaker ones mortally wounded by the 13-year disruption, and the trend in mass market products drove beer to become a single, bland commodity. When Americans rediscovered freshness, traditional crafts, and variety, beer followed wine and coffee to become the latest in a series of beverage segments enlivened by start-ups making expensive, boutique products.
That version may not be romantic or thrilling, but it’s at least as accurate.
The American Myth
As I watched a parade of White men flash across the screen of Brewmance, I started to think about how the popular craft beer story aligned so closely with the enduring myth of America. National myths are important markers—and creators—of identity, describing the way a culture sees itself. Americans look in the mirror and see pioneers, explorers, iconoclasts, and figures of unique moral character. In high school I was shocked to learn about the Virginia colony and its history of enslaving people. We had literally never spent a minute on it in grammar school. Instead, we heard ad nauseum about the Puritans fleeing religious persecution and forging a new life of freedom. Mostly we also heard how great those colonists were to locals, too. The Virginia colony couldn’t be bent into the shape of the American myth, so teachers omitted it.
As the country developed over the following centuries, the myth took on the flavor of the frontier, which accentuates the kind of hero who helped conquer and “settle” the continent. It borrows on similar themes from the colonial era, airbrushing out a lot of misery and death. Here’s Richard Slotkin, writing about it all the way back in 1973 in his book Regeneration Through Violence:
“That is the conception of America as a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top. The onus of potential gain was thus placed upon the individual to make his way in the world [and become] rich and self made on these new open lands.”
In many ways this is a harmless framework. It’s a myth of heroism as old as Homer. It is very hard to listen Ken Grossman or Kurt Widmer talk about founding their breweries without feeling the long hours in your back, or the sense of anxiety in your gut. Human creation is heroic. It’s what Brock accesses in Brewmance, and there’s a thrill in seeing it unfold even forty years after the first wave of these entrepreneurs. Yet there’s nothing inherently different about a brewery. Had Brock followed a tech startup in Silicon Valley, or a new shoemaker, or even an elite basketball player, the emotion of a dream resting on the knife edge between success and failure would be much the same.
It’s just that this mythic format comes with a big downside. While a myth can give events a structure, it also edits out discordant information. In choosing a myth, we reject other factual arrangements. By selecting a framework of craft beer that echoes the frontier myth, we miss other stories right in front of us. After hearing the story of how Jack McAuliffe “started the revolution” at New Albion dozens of times, I was so struck in hearing about his partner years later—a woman. In so many ways talking only about Jack follows the contours of that old myth: a man with a singular vision, irascible, irrepressible—maybe even a little unlikable—defies all convention to build the first brewery and change beer forever. Except that the story is really one of two founders, Jack and Suzy Denison. Suzy’s story is not Jack’s. She was the junior partner, yet she was very much a partner. And remarkably, it illustrates how early women were a part of craft brewing. Her part in that story may complicate the narrative, but she makes in far more interesting.
The founding myth repeated in Brewmance was an important one thirty, forty years ago. It helped tiny companies find their footing, appeal to customers, and use their collective strength to change laws and the structure of an industry. But however relevant that myth seemed in 1990, it’s much harder to maintain now. The number of breweries in the US is fast approaching 9,000. Many founding breweries sold their companies to the industrial giants, and many more now make exactly the same kinds of beers—and seltzers and flavored malt beverages—the founding generation decried. It’s hard to maintain a myth of rebellion once you’ve become a cog in an old machine.
If that seems like a sad place to end this, let me sound a hopeful note. I’m one of the people who has told the myth many times in the past. It seemed so inspirational. But it edited out vast segments of the population from unseen people who helped found those breweries to those who washed kegs instead of managing finances or employees. Further, the myth makes it a lot harder to identify the truly good and special beer if we’re only focused on the structure or personality of the entity making it. The more I think about real heroes in the industry, I see working brewers and taproom publicans overcoming their own obstacles and doing a lot more to change the industry than so many new copycat five-barrel breweries. They think about beer differently and invite different people into the world of beer—and into their breweries. They will write beer’s next chapter.
Myths can function like a straightjacket. In the coming years, we can look forward to women and people of color transforming the kinds of beers we drink and the way we drink it. We can begin to focus on those breweries making truly exceptional beers, rather than just the newest thing. Once freed of that old myth, in fact, there is a lot we can talk about. We’re actually sitting on the edge of a very new frontier, and it doesn’t look anything like the old stories we’ve told ourselves about craft beer. On balance, that’s going to be a good thing.