Craft Beer Resists the Culture Wars
Dave Infante has a fascinating article about how far-right gun fans have adopted seltzer as their drink of choice. The genesis seems to be the joke “there ain’t no laws when you’re drinking Claws,” which gives the drink a macho valence its otherwise lightweight image would seem to resist. “This is anti-establishment shit,” he writes, “and White Claw — through no fault of its own — is a near-ideal vessel to carry it.”
It’s a hermetically-sealed safe space where members have created a world of metaphor and symbols that all work to affirm in-group identity. If they appear like a bewildering welter of randomness—Hawaiian shirts, jargon, and now hard seltzer—that’s intentional: the only way to decode the meaning is by initiation. Give it a look if you have a sociological bent—it’s fascinating stuff.
It got me thinking about political signaling and beer. Beer generally has been a signature marker of class, signaling both expense (or lack thereof) and hard work. Beer is blue-collar, wine white. No one asks which presidential candidate voters would like to have a glass of Chardonnay with. They ask it about beer, the regular-man’s drink. One of my favorite old Henry’s ads captures this perfectly:
When craft beer came along, it took a self-conscious step away from this identity, appealing to upscale import-beer drinkers. For a while, “boutique” and “gourmet” were adjectives attached to these newfangled “microbrews.” But this again was a class distinction, not one of politics (the yuppies of the Reagan era with glasses of pale ale skewed decidedly GOP).
Following the revival of Pabst at the turn of the century, macro got a little boost by those seeking “authenticity.” Craft beer became associated with hipsters, the emblems of inauthenticity and objects of scorn (no one ever claimed to be a hipster). And while most hipsters would have, I guess, been characterized as liberal (certainly urban, which was coming to mean the same thing), craft beer never became a signaling symbol embraced by them the way those gun folk have chosen seltzer. It didn’t even really cut urban/rural: Pabst was an urban macro; Coors and Bud Light skewed rural.
As craft beer has become more popular, available not just in effete urban taprooms but saloons and chain restaurants nationwide, it has become a fairly generic commodity, losing its “yuppie” pretentious. (Pockets within craft beer, like the hazy/pastry houses, may be different, but they’re not a significant enough cultural force to be stigmatized yet.) The rural Idaho/Eastern Oregon branch of my family still mostly sticks with mass market lagers, but they don’t see anything wrong with craft beer. In Oregon, at least, craft has even penetrated those regions. Barley Brown’s is hugely popular in Eastern Oregon, for example.
All of which made me wonder: are the politics of craft beer fans now roughly on par with those in the general population? Beer hasn’t been exempt from some of the polarization we see in the larger culture. The cover photo to this post depicts the label for Level’s Stable Genius IPA as an example of one side of the equation, while the owner of Maine’s Sunday River brewery, which recently opened its doors in violation of a state order, is another.
So I ran a poll on Twitter. I’ve got 12,500 followers spread out across the country (and beyond) united by a single interest: beer. Most but not all are craft beer fans. They’re not quite as tight-knit a group as the gun folk, but they definitely represent a cross section of beer fandom. So what are their politics?
This really surprised me. Of those willing to identify with a group, three quarters called themselves left-leaning. Twice as many identified as moderate than right-leaning. A couple years ago, Bryan Roth documented a slight left lean among craft beer drinkers, contrasting a slight right lean among macro drinkers, but this is anything but slight.
It surprised me because craft beer has become so integrated into American culture. Back in the 1990s, a common epithet for what we’d now call a “liberal elite” was “latte liberal.” Now that every wide spot in the road has a drive-thru coffee kiosk, however, the slur has lost its resonance. (If you want to put some political mustard on a coffee term, you use “macchiato” today.)
All of which I consider very good news. I am far from alone in wanting public spaces free of the anger of the culture wars. So much in life gets instantly tagged as a symbol in this war—even the coronavirus, for God’s sake. Wearing a mask has become a political statement. When any potential symbol gets enlisted into the culture wars, it means the doors are barred, infidels are not welcome (nor would they wish to be), and participation becomes a political statement.
The only pushback I encountered from that twitter poll came from the far left, mad that craft beer was insufficiently pure. They felt beer should be political. Liberals mostly shrugged and very few commented—they certainly didn’t pick up the banner as a marker of their identity.
Finally, the poor moderates seemed resigned to their isolation between the factions—but maybe they don’t need to worry in this case. Despite the overwhelming lean in this poll, there seems to be a strong impulse to keep it out of politics. Maybe that’s why I was caught by surprise: despite the politics of craft beer fans, it seems like no one wants craft beer to be political.