What Would Beer Taste Like Without the Internet?
By the time you’re sitting down with a glass of beer, the experience of drinking it hasn’t changed much in, oh, ten thousand years or so. But much about how that beer was made, shipped, marketed, and sold has changed radically—and some of the biggest changes have happened during Ken Grossman’s professional career.
This came into my head when I saw the recent news that AB InBev had given up its three-decade monopoly on beer ads in the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl continues to draws huge audiences, but it’s really the only broadcast that still does. Thanks to Netflix, we no longer sit around a square box waiting for a media company to pipe content into our living rooms on their schedule, in a form that comes laden with ads. We hate ads, and now we don’t have to watch them. This one, small shift had nothing outwardly to do with beer, and yet it had a substantial effect. The development of food companies at midcentury was in part a media phenomenon with radio and TV ads. Beer ads helped fuel national consolidation that concentrated beer so much by the 1970s. Now that things have fragmented into 87 streaming services, most that eschew advertising, that model is broken. Netflix and its imitators alone may have shaved a few million barrels off Bud’s bottom line.
It’s hardly the only example. I spent a few minutes recently thinking through the way technologies completely unrelated to beer nevertheless had a big impact on our favorite beverage. The list is pretty long and those changes are significant, at least in the way we engage with our favorite beverage. A few examples.
Personal computer (late 1970s). These were born roughly at the same time as craft beer. On their own, they didn’t have a huge impact. Sure, we all use them now, and brewers plug recipes and mash rests into them rather than penning beautifully calligraphied entries into brewing logs. But the PC became the default platform that enabled everything from those spreadsheets to label-designing Photoshop to collaboration-planning Zoom conferences.
Internet (1993). Much like the PC, the internet on its own didn’t do much. But as infrastructure, it created the capacity for everything from direct-to-consumer sales to Instagram influencers. (Incidentally, the date is a moving target, but this was the year the first browser, Mosaic, came online and the internet reached the public.)
Amazon (1994). Web commerce was surprisingly slow to develop. Everyone could see the potential, and companies like Amazon created virtual marketplaces. Yet Amazon didn’t make a profit for a decade, and a ton of imitators (remember pets.com?) failed during the dot-com crash of 2000. None of this was very relevant to beer until Covid, when breweries finally saw the value of selling online. It seems a small thing, but imagine how differently that crisis would have unfolded pre-internet.
Wi-fi (1997). We live in a world seamlessly integrated with humans and computers talking to each other. Without the internet sailing through the air on radio waves, none of that would be possible.
Google (1998). Young people will not recall an era when there was a bunch of cool stuff on the internet but no reliable way to find it. The browser and search-engine wars of the 90s were eventually settled when Google figured out how to get people where they wanted to go.
GPS (2000). This technology has become so embedded in the way we navigate the world that it’s hard to imagine life without it. I actually remember international travel before the internet, phones, and GPS. The world seemed more unknowable, often dangerous, and places more hidden. Now it’s almost impossible to get lost or fail to find a brewery. (The tech was decades in development, but finally came online for public use in 2000).
Wikipedia (2001). Barroom debates are as old as barrooms. Until the aughts, however, they remained unresolvable. Now when someone makes an unlikely claim, we just pull out our phones and fact-check them on the spot.
Social Media (from 2004). Businesses used to have extremely limited opportunities to engage the public. They could put an ad in the yellow pages, buy ads, or try to attract a reporter to write an article. That all changed with social media, when even the tiniest computer could easily reach its customers. (History: YouTube and Reddit (2005) were early proto-social media sites. Facebook and Twitter launched to the general public in 2006. Facebook came online in 2004 for use at Harvard, and was a university-only site for a couple years. Instagram, now the most important brewery tool, didn’t launch until 2010.)
Netflix (2007). The streaming revolution has done much to scramble the way big beer markets its products, as I mentioned above.
iPhone (2007). By far the biggest change in social life has been the switch to smart phones with the launch of the iPhone 15 years ago. It integrated so many of the early innovations and put them in our pockets. Beyond the tech I’ve already mentioned, translation software makes travel a breeze, picture apps integrate with social media, travel apps tell us where to go and book rooms for us, and specialty apps like Untappd allow us to go deep on our hobbies.
Ridesharing (2010). In retrospect, Ridesharing basically amounts to taxis with an app, but that has transformed our mobility. Too many of us recall standing outside a pub for an hour waiting for a cab in the bad old days. Now we can at least see where our ride is and how long it will take to reach us.
To recap: the internet didn’t really change beer. The evolution we’ve seen in styles, processes, and ingredients looks totally normal by historic standards. But the way we interact with beer is radically different. These changes have been slow and incremental enough that we don’t think about it, but they’ve been huge. Beer may not have evolved unusually, but the business has, and almost unrecognizably.