Twenty-Five Years Later
It is a funny thing to get old.* A period of time can pass—decades—and it feels a bit like a single, continuous experience. That impression is accurate in the sense that we constantly feed experiences into our understanding of the world, one that will deepen and grow richer with time; but it’s also misleading because we forget the way events felt at the time, before we absorbed them into the tapestry or our understanding.
Today is the 25th anniversary of the attacks on 9/11, and I am feeling both impulses: revisiting the day itself and the period thereafter, and reflecting on the decades of reverberations that continue to vibrate throughout American society. As I saw this day approaching, I wondered if a beer blog would be the right place to post it. The attack on the World Trade Centers and Pentagon have no salience at all on beer; they just don’t. Yet that reverberation—the more I thought about how the aftermath to 9/11 affected the US, the more I saw it play a role in beer as well. So, if you’ll allow an old guy some runway, I have some reflections twenty-five years later.
Nearly half the population has no firm memory of the attacks; 38% of Americans weren’t even born yet. More than half the country is younger than 35. To situate you in the times, the internet was still in its infancy: Wikipedia was founded in 2001, Google just three years earlier, and we still got most of our news from TV and newspapers. Just a few blogs existed—literally—and social media was years away. People were very excited about message boards, the cutting-edge technology of the day. Britney Spears was the queen of pop, and music was being rocked by the scandal of pirated audio: 2001 was the year the record companies shut down Napster’s free music-sharing.
I was already writing about beer, which seemed to exist almost completely outside the world of terrorist attacks. This is another thing about history. For the people living through a time, they inhabit many worlds—family, career, entertainment—and considered separately, they seem to float without connection to other events. Mention the 2004 Red Sox to me, or even the crushing collapse to the Yankees the year before, and it seems to have nothing to do with the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet these domains are not always as separate as they felt at the time.
Beer was on its own trajectory, but when I think about it, the contours roughly followed the national mood. The United States beer market was around 200 million barrels, and half of it was made by still-independent Anheuser-Busch. There were around 1,500 craft breweries making less than five million barrels of beer. (Today the market has slid to 189 million barrels, despite the country having grown by 62 million people, or 22%, to pinpoint one measure of change.) IPA was a decade away from being the most popular craft style, and Americans were drinking a lot of porter and amber ales in brewpubs—or gallons and gallons of light lager at home.
I was writing exclusively about local beer, which, since the closure of the Blitz-Weinhard brewery in 1999, meant craft beer. It was not a great time for the industry. Craft brewing had been stuck in neutral for several years and would remain that way for several more. A big part of my early career was writing obits for breweries that failed in the first craft beer recession. Dreary work. After I quit writing the beer column for the local alt-weekly around the time of 9/11, they didn’t replace me. Instead, a young arts and culture editor made the decision to pivot to cocktails, which is where she thought the real action was. To further underscore just how bad things had gotten in the town we’d named Beervana, Portland became the testing ground for reviving Pabst Blue Ribbon, which became a hipster emblem for disaffected Gen Xers.
We have attached a narrative of unity to 9/11, with heroes pulling together and George W. Bush cautioning against vilifying Muslims. Everyone was wearing “FDNY” hats. But it didn’t last. The wars, Hurricane Katrina, and the financial collapse all marked that first decade, and they all contributed to a widening schism in society. In the weeks following 9/11, people repeated the same realization like it was a mantra: “I didn’t think something like this could happen here.” That naïveté was the sandy foundation underneath Americans’ belief in their own untouchability, and when it washed away, it left a raw, mean sense of betrayal we still live with today. Somebody had to be responsible, and we were gonna make ‘em pay. When the New York-born president calls his political opponents “scum,” we hear that contempt.
My experience of the end of the 2000s was one of healing and hopefulness, though—and a renewed excitement about beer. Barack Obama’s campaign for president seemed very positive, and he won a landslide by modern standards (53-47%, a ten-million vote margin). A lot of people who would later turn against him felt, for one uniting moment, good about electing the first Black president. In craft beer, too, this was the start of a decade-long explosion. The number of breweries grew, as did the amount of craft beer Americans drank, but even more than that, the changes in hop breeding and brewing philosophies led to the creation of a whole new category of beer. It was incredibly exciting to watch American breweries give birth to this new tradition, and see it zip around the globe.
The one constant is change—remember this—so of course this period of plenty didn’t last. It turned out the election of a Black president wasn’t entirely uncontroversial (imagine a droll-understatement emoji here). The backlash led to the election of Donald Trump and a period of deepening polarization. For years I said on this blog that “politics divide, but beer unites,” a statement true enough for gentler eras. But the next decade was a black hole of poisonous politics that dragged everything to its center. Bud Light learned this in the most painful way.
When I consider the past 25 years, from the day the planes crashed into the towers, it feels like a process of undoing. I experience a pervasive sense that society no longer works, and I think this crosses political, religious, and racial lines. We fight desperately over the root of the problem, but we all agree there is a problem. A bad one.
I hadn’t thought about how that sense also characterizes beer, but it does. The industry has been in survival mode for over six years now, and the hits don’t cease. That’s true not just of craft beer, but the whole beer industry—and in fact, the whole alcohol industry. Now we have a war in Iran (another Mideast war!) driving up diesel prices and the costs of shipping; we have a wholly unnecessary trade war with our closest neighbor; and we have a population that is less and less willing to go out for a few beers. Covid kicked off this dismal period, but now well after its end, things never seem to improve. That process of undoing in beer, too.
When I reconsider these 25 years, which are still influenced by the attack on 9/11, that sense of instability is the strongest residue. The shock waves of 9/11 have made the century’s first quarter seem like a frantic effort at restoration, one that gets ever more desperate the longer it fails to happen. Add in the toxicity of social media, the sudden arrival of AI, and a summer of apocalyptic heat, and it all feels so uncontrollable.
But. Change will happen, because it always does. If we look back to Y2K and inhabit our expectations then, they would fail to anticipate so much of what actually did come to pass. Or our expectations in 2007, or 2015, or the winter of 2019-‘20. Each time we had mental images of what the next few years would look like, imaginings that were completely upended by 9/11, the financial crisis, the election of Trump, and Covid.
So whatever we think will happen in the next two, five, or ten years is almost certain to be wrong. That’s true of politics, beer, and just about everything else. Since I tend to have a very dark sense of the future, I remember this and try to hold open the possibility that we begin to heal. Or, if I inhabit the beer-reality, that we exit this recession and amble off into a fun, exciting new phase. Hey, it could happen!
Here’s hoping—
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* I’m closing in on 59, which older people often tell me is young. It is an imposition of their current experience on my experience, one that betrays their own earlier experience. I remember being in college and encountering a friend’s 32-year-old landlord. He seemed inconceivably old to me. My mother, who now dismisses me as “still young,” went through a midlife crisis in her mid-forties when she started to notice pouches forming beneath her eyes. We all feel our age. So to everyone younger than me, I see you. I remember what it felt like to be your age, and I respect the vertigo you feel, whether you’re 22 or 82.