It was somewhere around hour five of in class time on Tuesday when I tripped over an idea. I was explaining American Lager. There’s an exercise where we try a number of them side by side in order to display the amount of difference between them. “These products were designed as National brands. They were designed to offend as few people as possible and to sell indefinitely. What they represent is the End of History from a Brewer’s perspective. The brewers who made these thought they would never have to make a new product again.”

The products in question were Budweiser, Canadian, Keith’s, and Moosehead. Typically, whichever one is freshest is the most popular one in this exercise. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate that there is a difference from a palate perspective in these beers when you absent the marketing component of them.

I went a little further: “It’s basically the difference between Modernity and Post-Modernity, if you want to get all literary criticism on it.” Unsurprisingly, no one wanted to take up that concept and run with it on an idle Tuesday evening.

The divide is not that difficult to explain. Modernity can be looked at as more or less the culmination of hundreds of years of Enlightenment thought: The idea that the world can be catalogued and explained using various phenomena. The end of Modernity represents the completion of that scientifically driven catalogical tendency. Of course there are always new things to learn, but for the most part the majority of human needs have been met, and they are being satisfied by very large things that we have built.

There are different typical demarcation points for this point in time. In Literature, they tend to use either 1939 or 1945. I’m not current with all media subsets, but I’d bet that Rock and Roll in 1956 would be one people might use in music. Similarly, the Summer of Love and Watergate are probably good political demarcations. Essentially, you’ve got a forward march of history through which progress is made (or at least a direction is continued in), and, having reached the point where there is a pinnacle of progress (or at least an outcome of direction), everyone says “Thanks, but….” as though someone has just brought a bottle of Mateus to a dinner party.

In brewing, that demarcation point is the large macro brand. Your BJCP defined Standard American Lager and American Light Lager probably make up 80% of the beer market worldwide. Possibly more. From a developmental standpoint, something like Miller Lite is the logical conclusion of the development of brewing technology over the course of a hundred and fifty years. Lager styles were on a directional journey towards being lighter. The conditions needed in order to make beer like that involve the improvement of malt kilning technology, brewhouse technology, refrigeration, materials, lab measurement. Consider this: When the Carling O’Keefe Carlingview plant opened in Toronto in 1961, it was given the entirety of the A section of the Toronto Star rightly treated as a momentous event. It was a momentous event in the sense that the brand new plant represented the culmination of what was possible, if not what was desirable. If everything had remained analog, improvement might never have been necessary again. That’s not very long ago, really. Barely sixty years ago, there were never going to be new things again.

The difficulty is that marketing is an enormous component of the beer industry. To small breweries, brands, labels and merchandise are all important.  At a time when there were only three national American networks, it made sense that you had national brands. You had unidirectional advertising and a captive audience. Everyone wanted to see what Johnny Carson would do. Everyone got sold your product. Hell, if you’re watching The Tonight Show, you’re probably drinking the beer they’re advertising.

It’s not surprising that the resurgence of brewing coincided largely with digital media. The creation of additional channels and the idea that you’re suddenly playing to market preference is a defeat for Modernity. The difficulty for brewing is that it had been almost entirely reduced to light lager styles in North America.

When you think about the work Michael Jackson did cataloging existing beers in to styles or groups, it’s probably good to think of that as being relatively subversive in that it undermined the status quo. With very few small brewers, you have to start somewhere. If you view North American brewing from Liberty Anchor Steam forward, you have to take into account that the brewers are borrowing ideas from Germany, England, and Belgium. It takes American brewers about thirty years to get to the point where they have adapted exaggerated versions of these styles, and this coincides with the beginning of the current boom.

We’re now solidly into Post-Modernity with 1000 breweries in Canada and over 7000 in the United States. We have shifted from unidirectional information in the form of Analog TV to omnidirectional information in the form of a participatory social media culture. Beer has become primarily dialogical (responsive to previous input) as opposed to authoritarian (progressive towards an end goal).

Consider, for a moment, Brut IPA. It was invented in San Francisco something like 20 months ago. I have had something like 10 of them in Toronto this year. If you had asked people 21 months ago whether they knew what glucoamylase was, you would have gotten blank stares. The constant and ongoing dialogue that plays out in social media continues to compress distance and time.

This is a problem for a couple of reasons. For one thing, reality has not compressed in distance and time. This is something that makes life difficult for just about everyone. The constant bombardment of information from digital sources has a dilatory effect on the perception of time. We live in real time, but the constant urgency of social media can make that seem both boring, something we’ve chosen to replaced with a constant, low-level, jangling anxiety.

The other difficulty is that innovation is not directional. A brewer might never make the same recipe twice in the pursuit of keeping up with online time. There’s a panoply of ingredients and information to borrow from, so the tendency is to just keep trying things. Such continued experimentation without purpose other than experimentation limits progress in a direction, but it’s becoming obvious that any progress being made is no longer centralized. Any new trend can be picked up and distributed on the other side of the world basically immediately. There’s no intellectual property and the ubiquity of social media shares the information and the dialogue continues with people responding to that stimuli. As a beer drinker, you have the choice to never try the same thing twice and still try about three beers a day indefinitely. That is possible.

I was having a conversation the other day explaining that I straddle a line, generationally. I’m either the youngest cohort of Gen X or the oldest cohort of Millennial. That’s sometimes referred to as the Oregon Trail generation, because we had to learn DOS commands to play games on the computer. I remember when drinking a six pack of something was sort of the way that you consumed beer. At this point, what I’m seeing more frequently is that it is more experiential consumption that people are looking for. One, but one good one. Possibly several good ones, but of different origin.

Unsurprisingly, I have sympathy for both camps. I like the fact people are making glitter beers and lactose milkshake IPAs and Kveik beers and kettle sours and Keptinis and whatever. I understand the drive to create. Sometimes, I want to drink four pints of the same thing.

I have concerns about long term viability. I have been reading Joseph Tainter, an anthropologist who deals with the Collapse of Complex Societies. He argues that the difficulty you face in a complex society is that in the long run, increased territory requires increased specialization of personnel. The number of specialized roles in a society become increasingly difficult to justify from a resource perspective because the return on investment becomes smaller and smaller as they become more specialized. Most of the easy gains are achieved early on in the process of expansion in a Malthusian system.

When you consider the territory that beer now covers (The BA having released an interim style guideline update yesterday) and the sheer number of ingredients now being incorporated (herbs, fruits, flowers, new yeast strains, lactose, enzymes, bacteria, fungi, glitter, THC, CBD, ectoplasm, and unobtainium) you run into something akin to administrative problem. Put simply, the total number of beer drinkers in North America are falling. Volume is also falling. Now, most of that loss is a problem for the big brewers who are still selling products from Modernity.

However, as Post-Modernity in brewing continues and people search for increasingly niche pockets to brew in, the return on investment becomes harder to justify. The big brewers probably considered early craft brewers like Steam Whistle a minor inconvenience, but Steam Whistle is easy to justify from a resource perspective. It filled an obvious market gap in the year 2000.

I figure that after about 2010, people were no longer massively dependent on cultural or stylistic designation for the beers they were making, so experimentation eventually rose to the forefront. I just wonder how many of these beers are actually filling a niche and how many of them exist to exist. Is the insurmountability of the topic damaging to the business aspect of the category? If you have to explain a kettle sour by saying “it’s functionally equivalent to lemonade” or a milkshake IPA by saying “it’s like adult fruit juice,” does that excuse people from buying beer at all? Do they exist just to be experienced? Will they exist next week? It seems awfully close to Babel.