Call them beer snobs and they’ll likely agree — craft beer and homebrew enthusiasts are known for their discriminating palettes and particular distaste for corporate brews.
For Janel Beckham, homebrew and wine-making specialist at Fifth Season Gardening Company, the increasing popularity of such critical taste represents the rise of local beer.
“More and more people seem to be getting into craft beer or homebrewing, and less and less people seem to be just settling for a Bud Light,” Beckham said.
Beckham mixes work with pleasure and research. As a communications and cultural studies doctoral candidate at UNC, Beckham is studying the changes in cultural valuation of beer in the last 100 years.
She’s found that attitudes about beer can be emblematic of larger cultural movements. During the age of prohibition, the beverage was a racialized social ill, while just a few years later, drinking beer was an activity thousands used to lift military and civilian morale during World War II.
Beckham says in her nearly completed dissertation, “The Value of a Pint: A Cultural Economy of American Beer,” contemporary homebrewing has become a movement that, in part, advocates sustainable practices of producing, distributing and consuming beer.
“For a really long time in U.S. history, beer culture was really dominated by three companies who produced essentially the same style of beer,” Beckham said. “You had Miller, Coors and Anheuser-Busch who were producing this light American lager, that, you know, isn’t terribly good.
“I think when people finally started to realize that they could get out of the shadow of this terrible cooperate beer and create products for themselves that are highly personalized, exactly what they want and really great quality, something exciting started.”
Beckham organized Homebrew for Hunger as a charitable celebration of the variety of local homemade beers.
