A few years ago the City of Vancouver made a few small changes to its liquor rules to allow breweries to have "tasting lounges" where one could consume an unlimited amount of beer (ie. a bar) instead of a limited amount of 'tasters'. This tipped the scales to make a brewery a dramatically more viable business model and the amount of breweries in the city has exploded. In the quasi-industrial/residential neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant alone there are seven, while in the other industrial/residential area across town there are ten more.
The amount of growth has been astonishing, with more and more municipalities in the broader metro area following the City of Vancouver's lead and incentivizing brewery growth.
Accordingly local beer now dominates. Whereas a decade ago you had major national brands as the common choice with craft imports from Portland and Seattle as a special treat at specialty stores, now there's so much good local stuff that there's barely any room for the good Portland and Seattle options.
I see no downside to this shift from major corporate beer to smaller, local craft fare. The small local companies employ more people, the quality is dramatically better, and the money stays in the local area.
My expectation going forward is similarly to how it is not unusual at all for a town to have several mom n' pop restaurants, every town with have several mom n' pop locally serving breweries too.
> I see no downside to this shift from major corporate beer to smaller, local craft fare.
This is a model which has worked for hundreds of years in Germany. If you go to a local pub, you tend to either get a regional beer (eg hofbrau in Munich) or a micro brew from the village/town/pub itself. There's a huge amount of pride in local brewing.
Munich is perhaps a bad example since several of their breweries export globally (eg Paulaner, Franziskaner). In some cases these are very much mass produced brews, but in more rural places it's quite common to find the pub has a fermenter in the basement.
To a lesser extent this is the case in the UK, where most towns have their own brewery and will sell to all the local pubs. But the difference in Germany is that often there's no competition at all - it's the local helles or nothing.
Somewhat off-topic: Tegernseer is a very good Bavarian brewery whose beer is available at almost any currywurst cart in Munich but (regrettably) is not exported internationally.
Their brewery/pub in Tegernsee is an excellent day trip by train; far less crowded than the Munich beer gardens, and delicious food to boot. One of my fondest memories of visiting Bayern :-)
It's also interesting that Augustiner has been readily available in Berlin for a few years now (Augustiner is famous for not doing any promotion or advertisement, they just sell beer. In the 80s/90s they also sold lemonade, but stopped that due to needing all the capacity for beer, as I heard). But now Augustiner has become mainstream and not hip enough for Berlin anymore, so I've seen more and more Tegernseer there everytime I visit...
> To a lesser extent this is the case in the UK, where most towns have their own brewery and will sell to all the local pubs.
Indeed, and it's making a comeback. You see a lot more local beers (and they're a lot more popular) than you did even 5 years ago. Two of my peers in their early twenties have gone into (local) brewing. One of whom did this as an alternative to university, one of whom took this route after studying chemistry.
A similar law change led to a similar trend across all major cities here in India. I don't think I can even count the number of breweries in cities like Mumbai and Bangalore.
I wish this would happen to food production, local growers setting up small operations of good quality organic food. I can imagine multiple tiny operations enabled by automation and hydroponics growing food to supply their town. I feel like this will happen but not in my lifetime.
I lived in Vancouver during that time and got to visit and meet the people behind all those new breweries through the UBC Brewing Club. It was truly inspiring. People just a little bit older than us combining their passion with engineering and some business savvy to build these amazing companies, some of which are huge now (e.g. parallel 49).
In hindsight, I think those days may have been the most excited and hopeful I've seen kids from my generation be about 'Capitalism' and their ability to make it doing something they thought was cool, especially the non-overachiever, arts major kids. Even if we weren't thinking about the brewing industry in particular there was something infectious about that energy.
One possible interpretation of this trend is that it is yet another manifestation of the neoliberal era. With the steady loss of job security and other benefits from stable employment, along with a society that repeatedly stresses the virtues of individualism and "hustle", it looks increasingly attractive for people to strike out on their own.
Through that lens, one might say that while this article focuses on some successful cases, it ignores the incredible hardship of this ordeal, and the thousands of failures that have happened happening to other people (or even the same people) attempting the exact same thing.
That said, this looks mostly like the future that I want to see. I think that the future is local (maybe even hyperlocal) and a world in which both producers and consumers are more attuned to locality and spatiality drastically widens the possibility space of new experiences.
I think the most radical interpretation of what I actually want to see is a future that's less Darwinian, one in which people can be artisans without also spending most of their lives being entrepreneurs.
I think it's always been around, but it's only recently, thanks to the internet and good economic prospects and people with a lot of expendable income, that these breweries have become viable again. Previously, only the bigger breweries with the bigger distribution networks were viable. And before that, before the distribution networks and marketing campaigns, it was back down to local breweries.
Prohibition also had a big impact on the alcohol business in the US.
I think there's been an under supply of quality in goods and services for some time. The problem is the economies that can support quality are generally located around geographical centers where the main economic drivers are parasitic. Places like New York, Silicon Valley and the D.C. can support these businesses; Fresno, not so much.
To me it feels more like a reactipn against neoliberalism, and a return to more traditional ways of living and working.
I see it as possibly quite a positive way of dealing with jobs being automated away. Who cares how efficent production is if we have other companies producimng stuff efficently already. Let's use the time that efficiency buys us to make something special and unique.
"if machines take over the economy, and earnings and capital are therefore increasingly concentrated in a few hands, should resources be distributed? And what, if machines are doing the work, does everybody do with their time?"
I think this is an important point; there will not be one solution to this; some of the gap will fill with misery, some with generosity and family, some with hobbies and fun, some with hedonism and self destruction and some with quiet, small lives of local interest and self respect.
Fascinating article. Reminds me of a sci-fi story from 1958 called "Business As Usual, During Alterations". The premise is that aliens introduce a "matter duplicator" to human civilization that can instantly duplicate any item. The relevant quote:
> This morning, we had an economy of scarcity. Tonight, we have an economy of abundance. [...] This morning, you and the lieutenant were selling standardization. Tonight, it's diversity.
With the rise of 3D printers and the availability of electronic components, etc., how long there's a wave of "artisanal technology"? I look forward to buying a smartphone from a nattily dressed gentleman with a handlebar moustache and a solder-stained apron.
The same shift is to be seen, I think, in less tangible creative endeavors as well; thanks to Patreon, Twitch, the various art sites, and pr0bait, it’s increasingly possible for artists, musicians, streamers, and even a few writers to go full-time on their passions without needing to have a day job at all.
I’m not enough of a historian to speak to the potential parallels between this economic shift and the old patronage system of the Renaissance era, but I’d be interested to hear from someone who can.
The biggest difference to me between the old patronage systems and the current ones is the class of people who are performing the patronage and the class of people recieving it. IIRC, patronage systems of the old times were mostly under the wealthy, and thus it largely prevents artists from producing against the interests of the wealthy. While the notion that one still needs to respect their source of income still exists in Patreon, Twitch, etc. the set of all possible patrons is more diverse, leading to a more diverse set of artists who can market to niches.The sorts of people who are supporting NK Jemisin are likely not the sorts of people who are supporting ChapoTrapHouse.
Couldn't this also be said in a way of "people went to college for the sake of and got higher-paying jobs than doing a vocational training/small business and once they either saw they hated their desk job and also made a little money to start a business and live their dream?"
The amount of growth has been astonishing, with more and more municipalities in the broader metro area following the City of Vancouver's lead and incentivizing brewery growth.
Accordingly local beer now dominates. Whereas a decade ago you had major national brands as the common choice with craft imports from Portland and Seattle as a special treat at specialty stores, now there's so much good local stuff that there's barely any room for the good Portland and Seattle options.
I see no downside to this shift from major corporate beer to smaller, local craft fare. The small local companies employ more people, the quality is dramatically better, and the money stays in the local area.
My expectation going forward is similarly to how it is not unusual at all for a town to have several mom n' pop restaurants, every town with have several mom n' pop locally serving breweries too.