The Paths to Becoming a Craft Brewer and Craft Beer Consumer

Abstract

This chapter examines how, given the historical realities that have built the current structure of the craft beer industry in the United States, we today see a structure that is itself racialized, gendered, and exclusionary. The systematic erasure of black and brown practices of brewing and drinking in early America; the creation and solidification of pubs and taverns, and the subsequent establishment and legal consecration of such spaces as 'white' establishments; the construction and solidification of the three-tiered distribution system that defined the oligopolistic beer structure that launched the big beer families; and all the way through the signing of the Homebrewers Act in 1978 — all these things have contributed to and solidified this structure. It is worth interrogating how it is that individuals have gotten and contemporarily get into the positions within the three-tiered system itself. The structure itself is one thing; the bodies within that structure are another, having the potential to either challenge the structural realities and/or to build the culture and symbolic violence that continues to actively exclude people of color. The chapter then lays out the social structure of becoming a brewer, a beer representative/distributor, and a consumer — the three parts of the three-tiered distribution system.