“Local” Beer — Beervana

The last time I was in Belgium, I was chatting with a few Bruxellois about my plans for the day. I was off to Antwerp, I said. They looked at me with mild shock, as if I had announced my plans to lunch in Berlin. I wondered if perhaps this had to do with a local rivalry between the cities, but no. I learned the reason when I asked if they had recommendation. “No,” they groaned. They almost never went to Antwerp. “It’s too far.” Twenty-five miles separate the cities, and a train will deliver you from the heart of one to the other in 40 minutes.

In the United States, by contrast, 40 minutes describes a pretty normal length of time to get to work in the morning, or the distance to the nearest grocery store. The US is 263 times larger than Belgium—that’s just the lower 48!—so we live in different mental geographies. In much the same way, what we consider a “local” beer really depends on where we live.

Many products are untethered to place. Where was your car built? Where did that orange come from? No one cares. But in beer, “local” still matters. The question is, how near or far can you push it? Alan McLeod:

“Basically I see that one of the tensions is framed by the economics of investment required for scale. Locals have done well. Turns out there was space for a few big grocery store national craft breweries but at the expense of those intercity / interstateers. See, I think that the mob of ankle nipping locals can defend themselves from big craft in each market but regionals have found themselves, for a few years now, neither here nor there.”

I agree with this, and it’s been true for the better part of a decade. The regional breweries can’t compete with the giants on price, and lose the advantage of “local” affection the further they try to send beer. I recently got to see the barrelage of those regional breweries, and it is mostly sinking as this dynamic squeezes them more. And yet if you zoom in a bit, something interesting is going on as well.

If you surveyed the beer cooler at the local grocery store in different regions (not just the U.S., but anywhere), you’d see different retail space given to local, regional, and national brands. Some places I visit have mostly national brands and a sad little pocket of local brands. In other places, the reverse is true.

What’s curious is how contingent that concept of local is. In Oregon, there’s the very local—the brewery in your neighborhood or town—and then the “local,” which means made in the state. Portlanders don’t distinguish between Breakside (Portland), pFriem (Hood River), or Deschutes (Bend) when they’re reaching for a sixer; they’re all local. You might give your local brewery more of your business than driving to the one a little further away, but really, anything in the state will scratch our parochial itch. And it is parochial, because here’s the thing: you won’t see many (or any) cans on that grocery shelf that come from Vancouver, WA. Vancouver is, even by Belgian standards, very close—just a river’s width away—while Bend, even by Oregonian standards, is a bit of a drive (three hours). Yet in our beer-buying decisions, the latter is the “local.”

I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but I’ll throw one more log on the fire to see if it burns. The salience of “local” isn’t consistent, either. In places with less-established beer culture, it just doesn’t mean as much. People haven’t developed the habit of drinking local, and have affixed their warm feelings on regional or national brands. It takes a while before drinkers re-orient and start choosing local simply because it’s local. National brands do more poorly in places like Oregon than Alabama. This is the rising-tide-lifting-all-boats phenomenon, wherein the salience of local increases the more breweries there are. You’d think competition would be bad, but in fact, small breweries in Oregon can sell a decent amount of beer—two or three thousand barrels—and that probably represents one of the larger Alabama breweries.

This is a pretty bloggy blog post in that I have mused aloud and find myself with no real way to close things, so I’ll let it peter out with an invitation to you: what’s “local” mean where you are?