Is American Craft Beer "Liberal?"
Over the weekend, I visited a brewery in an exurban town on the edge of or in Trump country (I can’t find stats local enough to tell me). Situated in an industrial park, it had a very suburban feel, and the only way to visit was via car. The inside was decorated with stuffed elk heads and geese. The flickering light of a football game illuminated one wall. Nearly every table was occupied by families, in ages ranging from infants to 80 plus. And on the door was a sign announcing it was a safe space free of bigotry and welcome to all.
Was this a conservative environment? Liberal? Neither?
Last week Boak and Bailey had a wonderfully rich post that got me thinking. Following a kerfuffle over an incident in which a pro-cask organization advertised on pro-Tory news channel, B&B interrogated the idea of “conservative.” They were less interested in adjudicating the current dispute than ruminating on how culture, politics, and beer intersected and diverged. I had their commentary in mind while I sat in that brewpub, and began to wonder about the similar intersections in American society.
Boak and Bailey drew a smart distinction between political conservatism, defined by the politics of the Tories, and cultural conservatism, which in an ancient monarchal empire is a significant force. Cask ale, they argued, was a creature of the latter:
It’s horse brasses, Inspector Morse, dimple mugs, shire horses, blazers with badges, regimental ties, red trousers, vintage cars, cricket, golf, Alan Partridge with his big fat shot of Director’s.
The US has no king, no thousands of years of history. Our cultural markers of conservatism are different and far more fleeting. Powerful elites in the US are as likely to wear a hoodie as a suit, and no one wears a blazer with a badge. Generational wealth exists in the US, but families like the Rockefellers, Fords, and Waltons were never part of the ruling aristocracy with royal lands and all the rest. The powerful wealth in the US tends to be new or located in corporations.
That’s not to say there’s no cultural conservatism. The US is far more religious than the UK (never mind their national church), and for centuries conservatism and Protestant Christianity have been entwined. Respect for the traditional, nuclear family, a rural or anti-city orientation, rigid racial and gender roles, and a mistrust of higher learning are all fixtures of American cultural conservatism going back to the arrival of White colonists.
Cultural liberalism has, conversely, leaned into change and progress in nearly the same dimensions. It manifests differently across the centuries, from abolitionists in the 18th and 19th century to suffragettes in the early 1900s to civil rights activists, hippies, feminists and queer activists in the latter 20th and 21st century.
Politics have historically been a secondary force, but here’s where things get interesting. Until the 1980s, politics didn’t align with the parties. The massive Democratic advantage in the South lasted long enough that in 1996, Clinton was able to win five states in the South plus West Virginia. By then the parties were aligning in terms of ideology, culture. Twenty years later, when Donald Trump won West Virginia by 42%, the voters hadn’t switched ideologically from liberal to conservative, the rock-ribbed conservative state shifted from Democrat to Republican. And because politics, religion, and culture had fused, they all became emblems for each other. You could now select any marker from one, like country music (culture), religion (evangelical Christianity), or politics (the Republican Party) and they equally represent the other two. What was once a Venn diagram had become a circle.
To go back to that brewpub, some of the clues weren’t obvious. The families might have been Democrats or Republicans, the posed taxidermy geese a sign of rural life or a kind of throwback branding (it was actually the latter). But the one signifier that carried unmistakable coding with it was the inclusivity sign on the wall. A visitor from another country might have missed it entirely, and owing to its almost banal sentiment, ignored it. But nearly every American will see it as a klaxon.
When I asked X/Twitter whether a typical brewery pub/taproom feels conservative, liberal, or neither, only 6% identified conservative. In a country that wields every element of society as a cultural marker, everything in a sense becomes political. Craft beer has many “conservative” elements. Most breweries don’t pay well. Owners are typically more interested in lower taxes and looser regulation than their employees and customers—classic conservative policies. Until very recently, craft beer was not diverse in the slightest. And twenty years ago, hyper-masculine, occasionally sexist branding was common among small breweries. They code more as liberal because they’ve increasingly pursued inclusivity. Beer, with its innate communal element, is actually conservative in that way, but in the United States in 2023, it has become liberal.
The forces that have made this seem liberal didn’t necessarily even arise from inside craft brewing. A year ago, the beer landscape was relatively neutral, but in April, that all changed when Bud Light ignited a firestorm by embracing inclusivity. I doubt AB InBev imagined they had formerly been considered conservative by part of their base, or that this would be seen as laying down a major cultural marker. Of course it did, and the firestorm itself created the political lines. By making Bud Light explicitly political, it also changed the way people saw other kinds of beer. Craft beer moved to the left by not moving at all.
Things are likely to keep moving. Just this week, I got an email about “America’s Beer” (pictured above). It was a beer created to participate in the culture wars, much like Ultra Right beer, which also debuted this year. The more one kind of beer gets used as an emblem of political identity, the more formerly-apolitical beer takes on an identity by default.
Things do change. Thirty years ago, espresso drinks were used as an emblem in the culture wars, identifying effete urbanites. Now every small town in America (or the West, anyway) has a drive-thru espresso cart people in F-150s stop at on the way to work. Beer is too big and unruly a drink to be inescapably pigeonholed. Breweries in Portland and Boston are going to broadcast their owners’ liberal views. Breweries in smaller communities in red states will broadcast their owners’ conservative views. And in the meantime, everyone will keep drinking more and more Mexican beer, because nothing says America than Modelo.