A Message in a Bottle

You walk into your local watering hole and order a beer. The bartender smoothly fills a glass and sets it in front of you. “AH! My favorite!” You think to yourself as the first sip hits your palate. As you leave some cash on the bar, a TV in the corner of the room blares the latest football game. Even though you don’t like football, you gaze at it blankly while sipping your beer. While this may appear incredibly boring, on the inside you are in heaven. It’s been a long day and there’s nothing like a tall glass of your favorite brew to relieve some tension and relax. You aren’t thinking of anything but savoring the beer much in the same way one would enjoy an expensive glass of wine or a delicious meal at a fancy restaurant. You slowly nurse the beer along enjoying every aspect of it. Because it’s the quality you enjoy instead quantity, right? Too many times our society seems to encourage mass consumption of bland products without the quality. They say diversity is the spice of life and I’m inclined to believe it. An establishment that offers a wide variety of drinks would be more likely to get my business. Why? Because I enjoy being adventurous. Trying new things and tasting different flavors, especially when it comes to beers. If for nothing else, because there are so many different kinds.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating that you hide your problems in a bottle. Nay, quite the opposite. Having a beer helps you unwind, relax, and in some cases provides nutritional value. In some cultures, beer represents an important calorie supplement. In others, such as the ancient Egyptians, beer was the perfect gift for a king and was often used in religious ceremonies. Many more relied on this beverage due to a lack of sanitary drinking water. It would certainly appear as though alcohol abuse is more of a problem in industrialized nations. Take a 19th century United States for an example. The country shifted from an agrarian, agricultural based economy to a more urban, industrial based way of life. Large industrial companies like Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel, etc. employed millions of workers. This time period was pockmarked with violent worker struggles and extreme economic crashes/depressions. It’s not surprising that so many Americans abuse alcohol. It’s viewed as a way to help relieve the stress of being a slave to the economy. To make it worse, an industrial economy requires a consumer base and considering the advances in manufacturing at this time, alcohol became an inexpensive commodity. So would alcohol abuse be a social problem or the symptom of one?
Either way, though it is an important issue and needed to be mentioned, alcoholism isn’t what I want to focus on. Nor the possible causes of it. This article is about the industry itself.
Take your favorite beer for example and let us think back to that watering hole. Where did it come from? Is it Irish? English? Maybe it’s from Japan?! Beer is brewed all over the world in varying strengths and styles. I bet you have a pretty decent idea of what some of them are like and whether or not you would enjoy them. Maybe you prefer pale ales? Stouts? But if you are like me, you probably don’t know too much about beer from your local area. Is there even a brewery near you? What if there was, how would you find information about it? Who cares when you can just hop over to the convenience store down the street and buy beer that was brewed several thousand miles away? But herein lies a problem. You see, a large beer company buys up breweries around the world, distributes the beer, and by using its size it’s able to moderately influence markets around the world. To simplify, a smaller, local brewery is unable to compete with a company that brews and distributes one hundred or more beers. They physically and economically cannot rival the strength wielded by the larger companies. InBev, for example, is a huge European conglomerate of different breweries and distributors. We know them as the owner of Anheuser/Busch and Stella Artois. They have enough clout and capital to run advertising during the Super Bowl. Let’s see a local brewery do that. I’m betting that they can’t. The point I’m trying to make has more to do with an actual bar or restaurant than it does with the Super Bowl. But it does make a difference. A large company, like InBev, that distributes a huge variety of beer is able to control local markets because of their advertising. Advertisements run by InBev, Heineken International, SABMiller persuade more and more people to drink their products. Which is fine, but it requires local restaurants and bars to carry and favor “everyone’s favorites”. While local brews are aren’t offered as much if at all. “Who the heck ever heard of that beer? Get me a Bud please.” A bar might offer 50 or more different varieties of beer, but they’re supplied by at most 5 different companies. It’s a wonder local breweries survive at all.
In the beginning of this article I stated that I preferred a large variety to choose from, and I still do. But the question we have to ask ourselves is this: Is it worth it? A bar or restaurant that offers a fairly wide variety offers beers from around the globe will undoubtedly offer beer from Africa, China, German, the UK, etc, etc. Yet they won’t offer as many local ones. So what seems to be a wide variety actually isn’t because the same distributors are providing the same selection to everyone, even if the beer is from some obscure part of the world. But is it worth it? Is the large variety of international beers literally at your fingertips worth the loss of local breweries? A local brewery is literally drowning in a beer sea of imported competition. It becomes a question of international variety versus local flavor. I hear you, I hear you. You’re asking if there is really a problem with this. Am I just nit-picking? Why should I be worrying about something as sophomoric as beer economies when our national one is floundering, and unemployment is skyrocketing, and ,and, and. There are many other issues to deal with besides the problems of a few local yokels with a homemade distillery. And you’re right; beer may seem like a somewhat lesser problem than the others plaguing us right now. Some of you may have stopped reading this article because you don’t drink, and that’s fine. But this article isn’t necessarily about beer. With the exception of the bit about alcoholism, the rest of this article could be about one of any number of commodities that the United States imports at the expense of our local economies. Sure, beer is a pretty immature example, but this isn’t about beer. It’s about something else.