It’s not often that I find myself in the position of thinking that something someone else wrote requires rejoinder. However, as I took a break from doomscrolling last week, I happened across a piece by Jeff Alworth. I’ve read Jeff off and on for a decade, and in my experience, he’s usually at his best when he’s covering the beer scene in Portland. It is his baileywick and he has an unimpeachable grasp of the scene because he’s lived in it for nearly the totality of its modern era. 

That being said, in re: the piece he wrote last week about technology, “What Would Beer Taste Like Without The Internet,” I think he has missed not only a trick, but an entire cadre of performing canines. 

The reason for this is twofold:

Firstly, his chronology of technological innovation that has impacted beer ends in 2010 with ridesharing, but somehow manages to concede in an earlier entry that Instagram is the most important tool for breweries without actually giving it its own entry. That seems like a conceptual failing to me, as does the idea that nothing has happened since 2010. 

Secondly, the piece is without much consideration of causality. “This tech emerged in this year,” he says, but without much in the way of consideration of how the consumption and adaptation of that technology alters the informational package. The technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There’s a symbiosis 

For me the frustration is that it seems not to grasp that beer itself is a technological construct. In order for it to exist we need to create all of the ingredients, and all of the ingredients chosen to make an individual beer must be chosen by someone. There is always an intelligence behind the design of a beer because the constituent parts do not make themselves readily available. Beer doesn’t exist in the wild. What this means is that any technology that conveys information is going to fundamentally alter the intelligence of the designer of the beer.

Alworth states, “The evolution we’ve seen in styles, processes, and ingredients looks totally normal by historic standards.”

This is fallacious. It assumes that the subject matter exists independently of the consciousness that designs it and that a liquid has a forward arc of evolutionary capacity that it fulfills independently of design. We have expanded since 2011 from having ~2800 craft brewers in the United States to having something like 10,000. In Ontario, we have jumped from 40 to 410.

Consider this. The year in which beer sold best in North America was 1977. We didn’t have the internet. We didn’t have smartphones. We didn’t have Uber or Lyft or Instagram or Tiktok or chill ambient beats for teens to study to on Youtube. 7% of households in America had Cable TV.

In 1977, Miller Lite, by itself, sold 23 Million Barrels in America. That figure would have been the entirety of the Canadian beer market that year. How did it do this? Most of the consumers in the market had three channels broadcasting to them and the advertising was omnipresent. Laverne and Shirley, a show about people working in a brewery, was number one with a 32 rating on ABC.

In 2022, Sunday Night Football just about managed 5 in the ratings. In order to even find a sitcom, you have to drop down the list to number 36. At the same time, we’ve got 32% of viewing being done on streaming platforms. We’ve also got a vast majority of breweries in North America selling less than a thousand barrels a year. A majority of people don’t see TV adverts at all, but the fact that their friends are posting from breweries on Instagram is certainly likely to sway their decisions. 

In my lifetime, we’ve gone from unidirectionally broadcasted media consumed by an enormous portion of the public, to an individually curated media in which participatory platforms allow bi-directionally generated content created by anyone with a smartphone. The amount of information that is routinely shared through platforms like instagram, youtube, twitter, etc, is unprecedented in history.

Think about it this way: We’re in the middle of what is perhaps the largest boom of beer related ingredients that the world has ever seen. More hop varieties than ever. More yeast strains than ever. That’s before you get to adjuncts, enzymes, hopping techniques, first wort mashing, souring methods, bacteria, barrel aging, etc.

Instead of one intelligence like Joseph Owades who created Miller Lite and Boston Lager (ed. note: thanks to eagle eyed reader Jon Downing who points out that the latter was more of a team effort), you’ve got tens of thousands of brains working on creation in concert in what may as well be a massively decentralized iteratively developmental simulator, sharing their data with each other in real time via social media. The technology has turned us into a computational device.

When you see a brewer or brewery post on social media telling you about their product, whether it’s the strength, technique, malt bill, hop varieties, hopping rate, etc, they’re not only trying to position it to the consumer, they’re participating in a larger evolutionary discourse that is extant across an entire industry which has more participants than at any point in global history.

Breweries are constantly chasing trend. This is not necessarily because it is good for them, but because of the amount of information that is available to them on a constant basis. Like Chuck Yeager with the Sound Barrier or Hunter Thompson with a drug collection, the tendency is to push the envelope. It’s the anxiety of the possible related to you by the dopamine sink in your pocket; as though it were some rosary of innovation to worry at.

The medium is the message. And for beer, an informational medium, the message is massive decentralization of information expressed in your neighbourhood by brewers who feel compelled to continue partially due to the technology that feeds their sense of the possible.

To say that the internet didn’t really change beer misapprehends both subjects.