Getting crafty

Given the historical realities that have built the current structure of the craft beer industry in the US, 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:

In order to grapple with this, we asked our respondents several key questions that will help us to uncover the process connected to becoming a craft brewer and becoming a craft beer consumer, the two poles of the three-tiered distribution system— leaving out the fundamental structure of the middle-tier of distributors, who fundamentally connect the producer and the consumer (Withers, 2017) but in highly racialized, classed, and gendered ways. Their responses not only solidify what the industry has already known, and perhaps encouraged, but also illuminate the racial-organizational, structural, and cultural aspects that etch the paths more fully for some, and deny those in spades for others.