Gentrification and the Making of Craft Beer White Spaces

This chapter evaluates the ways in which craft beer has reshaped spaces, places, and cultures in the image of white people, whiteness, and white supremacy. Craft beer spaces and places are typically located in gentrified areas, which have become signifiers of gentrification and middle-class consumption. The chapter then argues that craft breweries socially and culturally construct authentic identities that reflect middle-class values. It also explores the ways in which gentrification and craft beer are entangled, and the processes whereby such beer gentrification leads to the creation of 'white spaces.' Using interview data, the chapter examines how these spaces discourage and exclude black people and other minorities from participating in craft beer cultures, and therefore its consumption.

The Paths to Becoming a Craft Brewer and Craft Beer Consumer

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.

Exposure, Marketing, and Access: Malt Liquor and the Racialization of Taste

This chapter investigates how the lack of diversity and representation in the craft beer industry has led to the systematic exclusion of black people from beer consumption. One way to do this is to focus on the use of racially targeted marketing to sell cheaper products of lesser quality to communities of color; malt liquor is a critical case. Another way is to interrogate the ways in which the contemporary craft beer industry has appropriated black culture and iconography to sell beer to white people. The issue of representation, both socially and culturally, is of key importance in looking at the marketing of beer. According to interview data, the issue of representation is a major barrier in preventing black, other minority, and female participation in craft beer and its cultures. Given this reality, it is not surprising at all that most significant efforts to diversify the beer industry have mostly been led by consumers.

#WeAreCraftBeer: Contemporary Movements to Change the Whiteness of Craft Beer

This chapter explains that although the central story of race and beer in the United States is one that centers on the production and reproduction of whiteness, there is reason to believe that the racialized social structure of beer might be cracking. It looks at several developments that may indicate critical change in the phenomenon of craft beer. There is no doubt that there are several contemporary currents that are pressing against the whiteness of craft beer, and there is also no doubt that it is all happening right now. The chapter highlights several of these taking place across the country, in minority-owned breweries and in the digital space of social media, in order to get a bird's eye view of their challenges and resilience in the face of such a structure. It also considers the few black/Latino/Asian and immigrant enclaves of beer in the country where beer is celebrated to its fullest. This leads into discussions of cutting-edge festivals like Fresh Fest and High Gravity Hip-Hop, as well as clever collaborations that are challenging the centuries-long relationship between whiteness and beer.