What we drink about when we drink craft beer

Narratives of localness and authorship of beer

read the Chinese version here: 当我们喝精酿时我们在喝什么？

A micro-brewery in Panyu, Guangzhou. Oct 2022.

Terroir

Terroir, is a term often used when talk about wine. It is the matrix of soil, climate, sunlight and other elements that give wine grapes their unique character. People chase terroir with wine glasses in hands, chasing a country, a riverbank, a winery, or even a slope with a particular orientation, a given year in which rain and sun are abundant or barren. Grapes were picked, crushed on site, fermented and aged in tanks and barrels, absorbing the local essence of sun light and moonshine, as is still the case today. Wine is so much about place of origin: a bottle of wine, branded with the name of the place, can only be tasted by going back to that very place that holds the authority of the land and sets the standard.

In the pre-globalization era, beer, like wine and perhaps other alcohols, was extremely localized – one place produced its own beer. If you look through the beer style guidelines, you will find many styles named after places, expressing the terroir of a place: the Czechia, with its extremely soft water, gave Pilsner its soft and elegant temperament; the British Isles, with its yeast, malting techniques, and hops, gave these warm and dark ales the fragrance of dried fruit and earth; Northern France and the Wallonia of Belgium, with its farming tradition of seasonal labor, gave Saison its unrestrained boldness; Germany, with its climate and the Reinheitsgebot, framed the brewing technique and practice of German lager, which in turn gave it its introverted precision and perfection. In those days, a local beer was so closely linked to its place of origin: it was the product produced by local ingredients, living traditions, and historical and social processes.

With globalization however, regional distinctions in brewing ingredients are gradually disappearing. Although there are still distinctions in malt of different origins, if they are all labeled by the trade name “two-row”, they can probably be considered the same thing; hops are picked and made into homogeneous pellets or liquid through increasingly advanced technology, and with only a concern for transportation and freshness, hops of roughly the same quality can be used anywhere in the world; for yeast brewers does not have to go after a particular part of a river valley or an orchard, because there are already all kinds of mature commercial yeast strains to choose from; and water profile can be adjusted at will with brewing salt. The ingredients for beer brewing have become readily available, just like paint, strokes and media in the hands of a painter, instruments, rhythm and scales in the hands of a musician, as long as one follows a certain style of technique and framework to combine them, one can paint paintings and play music that originally belonged to the other side of the world in any place. In this way, beer has been able to break out of the confines of “place” and gradually take on a “decentralized” quality. Beer brewers do not give a damn about authority, or hundred-year long heritage traditions - what you have brewed in your fancy red brick brewery or rolling hill farmstead, I can make it as well, in my kitchen, garage, and basement.

Neo-Local

U.S. hop regions, U.S. barley regions, U.S. craft brewery distribution¹

This is actually the essence of the spirit of the American craft beer movement – “I can make it too”. American hops fields are mainly in the Pacific Northwest and barley in the Mountain West, but breweries are all over the United States. If you look at the beer list of a typical American craft brewery, you will probably find that it brews both Belgian Trappists beer and German weizen, not to mention a wide range of “American” style beers that have evolved over the years (American IPA and American Stout, or fancier ones like California Common and American Wild Ale). Where the ingredients come from does not matter, neither does where the beer style originates from, what matters is that I, brew beer, here - and that constitutes the transcendence of the concept of "localness". In what is called Neolocalism² ³ in craft brewing, the brewery's "localness" is reflected in 1. environmental sustainability (how close the ingredients come from), 2. label design, the use of local names and images in branding and marketing, and 3. social and community engagement. As I understand it, this refers to the three dimensions of localness: local ingredients, local symbols, and local practices.

To elaborate these three dimensions, here is an example of Lychee Beer of Guangzhou.

Local ingredients: Lychee is produced in southern China - adding local agricultural products, adding Lychee to beer.
Local symbols: In everyone's concept and imagination, what is the representative fruit of Guangzhou? - Lychee - Then add lychee commercial products (puree, juice, essential oil) to the beer, symbolically fixed as a year-round supplied commodity of “southern China specialty”.
Local practices: Lychee begins to appear in the market in early summer - your family relative sent you a box of lychee from a suburb orchard, your office colleague also brings what his relatives sent, and news of sky-high prices of lychee began to appear on TV or web feeds - brewers experience this very scenario at the same time - through perception, thought, and practice, brewers translate this familiar element of "Lychee", which is represented through beer and then perceived by drinkers.

Local practice means that the idea of brewing takes shape here, the labor of brewing takes place here, the beer is sold here, and people engage here...... At this point, “localness” is the collective experience and memory shared by the brewer and the community, who are in the same field and place, such as the shared perception of seasonal change and migration of landscape. There is no clear boundary of a field and place, but there is an unsettled scale.

“Scale” is an idea often mentioned in geography. It is a viewfinder that frames how people perceive and understand the world. For example, there are different scales of "local identity": I am an Earthling or I am an Asian rarely appear in everyday discourse; I am Chinese or I am Cantonese occasionally appear in some grand narratives; I am from Guangzhou, I live in Yuexiu, I often walk To Beijing Road for dinner, to Wenming Road for dessert, to Zhuguang Road for groceries, there is a granny selling beef offal stew near my place ...... with the scale going down, appears the most everyday local identity. The larger the brewery, the wider the material network spreads, the longer the feedback chain, the less common experience, memory and language the brewery and the community share, and this is the “scale problem” that a brewery needs to make decisions on. Because the source of the localness at this point is the people and the community, the scale no longer needs to be grand, it does not have to be a vague “southern China” or a precise administrative “Guangzhou”, it can even be an urban village or a residential compound where the brewery is.

Authorship

Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Brewing, once said, “For us terroir has less to do with the dirt underneath the breweries where we make our beer, and more to do with the gray matter in the brewers’ heads. ⁴” As I understand it, this means that the terroir of a beer exists in the brewer's eyes and heart, brain and hands.

And the construction and narrative of terroir/localness is a path to “authorship”. If you do not agree with me, go make your own narrative. With that alternative path then you have explored, you become an example of “authorship”. Right now, there are still too few breweries and brewing entities in the industry in China, and thus too little narrative diversity to create a vibrant scene.

So as I understand it, when we drink craft beer, we are drinking about the “authorship” of the brewery: whether it follows a consistent logic and philosophy, and how it constructs its own narrative. There are a lot of people who struggle with the definition of craft beer, trying to frame it in terms of production, ownership, and other things. I think it's useful to look at whether the brewery still has a character, what their decisions are subordinated to, whether they are more like producing a commodity or creating a work of art, i.e. whether their beer has “authorship”. This is a continuous spectrum, and there is no clear-cut line, but if a brewery gets bigger and more “commercial”, it is bound to be more “universal”, so it will inevitably lose its “localness” and “authorship”.

To me, the most interesting thing about craft beer is that it does not appeal to external authority, it comes from the endogenous understanding and interpretation of its creators. It follows a framework, but it constitutes a complete narrative on its own. In this way it is more like cocktail than like wine or whiskey. But it still involves labor and fermentation, the improvement of techniques, the magic of microorganisms, the passage of time, more variables and therefore more complexity and beauty.

Reference

1. Image Source: Beer Maverick, USDA, The Brewers Association

2. Mathews, Adam J., and Matthew T. Patton. "Exploring place marketing by American microbreweries: neolocal expressions of ethnicity and race." Journal of Cultural Geography 33, no. 3 (2016): 275-309.

3. Holtkamp, Chris, Thomas Shelton, Graham Daly, Colleen C. Hiner, and Ronald R. Hagelman III. "Assessing neolocalism in microbreweries." Papers in Applied Geography 2, no. 1 (2016): 66-78.

4. Hepburn, Peter. "My Beer Year: Adventures with Hop Farmers, Craft Brewers, Chefs, Beer Sommeliers & Fanatical Drinkers as a Beer Master in Training." (2016): 98-98.

The Brewdog once filmed a show (The Brewdog Show) that featured beers that I thought were excellent examples of expression of “authorship”. Those beers perfectly embodied the three dimensions of “localness”: the ingredients, the spiritual symbols of the city, and the practice of brewing. My best two are Portland and New Orleans.