The Authenticity Trap

Authenticity means a lot to people. We demand it of our politicians and prize it in our clothing. We especially appreciate it in other people, favoring those who are comfortable in their own skin far more than the twitchy and awkward.

Of course, authenticity is a big deal in beer as well. The entire craft beer movement was launched with the potent fuel of authenticity: little breweries were craftspeople. They made beer without additives or adjuncts or large, automated brewhouses. They made beer properly, with barley and whole hops, in styles with actual flavor. They weren’t marketing companies attached to a flavorless liquid, they were proper artisans whose hands actually made the beer.

But here’s the thing about authenticity. It is not a fixed, measurable substance, like alcohol percentages or bitterness units. It is a vague prize the consumer bestows. A brewery need not change their beer to see their measure of authenticity change; as new generations arrive with different preferences in a transformed cultural context, what counts as authentic shifts.

All of this came into focus as I listened to Steven Grasse discuss Narragansett beer with Dave Infante on the most recent Taplines podcast. Narragansett is exactly the kind of beer that, circa 1995, would have been pegged as classically inauthentic. It’s an old American light lager associated with its home base in Rhode Island, but contract-brewed by Genesee in Rochester. In the 2020s, however, Narragansett’s fortunes have shifted, and it finds itself haloed in the soft glow of authenticity.

Grasse argues pretty convincingly that it’s winning the authenticity war on two fronts. Because of its soft, worn image as an old American brand, it has a patina of working-class cred those slushie-sour craft breweries lack. But it’s also beating breweries in its own class, like Pabst. Where big companies have slick ad campaigns, Narragansett’s is a more organic, bottom-up popularity, with salty and irreverent social media that streams from customers as often as to them. The old line is that you can’t buy authenticity, and for the moment, Narragansett apparently doesn’t have to. (Pabst, the first macro to pull off this trick nearly a quarter century ago, didn’t have to during their heyday, either.)

I wondered if there was any academic literature on the hermeneutics of authenticity, and there is, going back 30 years. It’s pretty deadening stuff, often written in the pompous prose of academia (to burgle Churchill, never in the field of scholarship have so many words been writ on so little a topic). The upshot is the banal observation that authenticity is preferable to inauthenticity. However, it was this passage* that caused the tumblers in my mind to fall into place:

“The 20th century saw ideals of authenticity and personal autonomy being co-opted by powerful economic forces whereby the symbolic resource of brands have come to offer transformations so that self-actualizing consumers can enact their true selves. In a similar vein, Holt (2004) demonstrates how iconic brands exude authenticity by encompassing political and cultural authority as resources for self-expression.”

Authenticity is a self-referential quality. We associate ourselves with products that have the social currency of authenticity because it reflects well on us. We become authentic when we consume the right products. For Baby Boomers and Gen Xers raised on dismal factory products like Wonder Bread and Velveeta, whole grain bread and artisanal cheese seemed more authentic. But late Millennials and Zoomers were raised in the world the Boomers begat, with lots of stodgy organic foods and twee “artisanal” offerings. (I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Zoomers look very dimly on any product labeled “artisanal.”). So to them, a return to something simple and straightforward, with a long history of continuity looks authentic. The little breweries that teem in their neighborhoods and peddle a psychedelic array of inscrutable products are the inauthentic ones as they vie with each other for consumer attention, willing to offer literally any product that will get customers through the door.

Anyone over fifty will probably scoff at the idea that Narragansett is more authentic than, say Hill Farmstead (to take a competing tribune of craft-era New England authenticity). But authenticity doesn’t exist as a platonic ideal. It is always provisional and ephemeral. The best you can do is connect with your customers and ride out periods when your category is out of favor. Things will come around again, eventually.

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Jonatan Södergren, “Brand authenticity: 25 Years of research,” International Journal of Consumer Studies, vol. 45, issue 4, 2021.