“I might argue that the average mass-market beer doesn’t look like beer, smell like beer, act like beer, is not made from proper beer ingredients, is not made how beer is made and is generally lacking in beer attributes”.
– Garrett Oliver in Beer and Philosophy: The Unexamined Beer Isn’t Worth Drinking
For a long time, the big beer corporations (BBCs) have tried to talk about anything but the beer itself. The BBCs applied ‘the mushroom theory’ when it came to their drinkers, ‘Feed ‘em shit and keep ‘em in the dark’. They differentiated their beers through advertising not the product itself, and made beer a superficial symbol of personal identity, giving only a cursory nod to the brewing process in between their marketing garble.
The BBCs branded and ‘blanded’ beer. They removed the sense of place from beer by taking ownership overseas and brewing ‘imported’ beers locally. They reduced taste and ignored the diversity of beer styles to produce indistinct and boring carbon-copy lagers. Basically, they produced beers that weren’t worth talking about. But times are a changin’, and so are the beers.
A niche movement of microbrewers and beer drinkers are galvanising to make beer something worth talking about again. Microbreweries are putting the beer (in the real sense, not the marketing BS sense) back in beer in Australia. Read More »
