Beer Wars!

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (or so it felt, because I always imagine that I'm making the jump to hyperspace when I'm driving through snow)...

BEER WARS!

Yes, I'm sure that plenty of people have used the Star Wars intro cliche, but I've been burning bio-oil for three hours now and the furfural fumes are putting the kibosh on my creativity right now. As such, I thought it would be a perfect time to do a film review!

I went to watch this movie in Golden, Colorado. Anyone who doesn't know what Golden is famous for, just walk into your local liquor store, go to the beer aisle and look at that monolithic, silver block of Coors cases. That Rocky Mountain water comes from an aquifer that lies partly beneath my house. The theater was about half full, which seems like a pretty good turnout from anywhere other than the sold out place in Boston. Everyone knew the answer to every brewing trivia question showed before the film. Everyone knew everyone else. Everyone was a Coors employee. I think there were a few isolated craft brewing fans up in the top of the theater, where the cool kids used to sit and drink their smuggled in cans of Keystone Light and make out during middle school. I could tell because they were the lonely cheering voices during the frequent microbrew coups set up in the film. I was hunched up in the front with my feet on the back of the seat in front of me. You could describe it as the fetal position, I guess.

Everyone was very respectful, there was no "booing" or anything like that (which frankly impressed me, after some of the big bad wolf images that Anat created relative to the monolithic multinationals), but if Golden is anything besides Coorstown, it is also a notorious haven of capitalists. I go to a school that often feels like it's owned by the oil companies. People cheered every time it was asserted that the point of a corporation is to make money for its shareholders. I think that perhaps these people missed the point that for the primarily employee-owned microbreweries, the point of the brewery is to do what they want to do. And they want to follow a vision of artistic expression through beer. They are the primary stakeholders in those businesses, and that's what they want to do. That's how businesses work.

It's obvious that Beer Wars was not meant to be a balanced documentary. Anat masterfully told a story of a struggle of art against advertising, of craft against commercialism. She tapped a different type of American dream. In the end, her own words gave the most succinct explanation of her vision: we, the consumers, vote with our wallets. We are choosing craft beer not because it's a gimmick that we're buying into, and not because, like Starbucks, it has become a part of a lifestyle that we identify with. We drink craft beer because it's an art form that we can appreciate and support. Most people that I know can't afford to do much to support passion and skill, especially these days, but we can choose to give our time and our money to an industry that promotes individualism, artistic vision, and a social, open existence. This is the new American dream. There is no more land to take and settle, industry has built up and crashed down and built back up again, but we will always be behind the concept of Manifest Destiny. Our destiny, now, is another type of fulfillment. There is no point in a dreary existence, and for many, the "finer things" in life are out of reach. Craft beer is available, low key, and delicious, and it gives poor college students and rich foodies alike the ability to bring something fine and something real into their lives.

I understand Maureen Ogle's contention, at the end, that the bigger, growing craft brewers will eventually try to get bigger. She is a historian. That's human nature, and that's what history is all about. History chronicles big things: big successes and big failures. The smaller things, and the things that are less easy to write down, don't get written down, and that is the case with labors of love. Perhaps Stone or Dogfish Head or New Belgium or any of the other regional microbreweries may indeed continue to grow and become a multinational company. Things change. The point remains, though, that the reason consumers put their wallets and their words forward to support craft brewing is not because those breweries are big, or because they have successful gimmicks or advertising campaigns. They like good beer that is made by people who get excited about good beer. History may be about money, but history doesn't take into account the entire human experience. If it did, history books would read like James Joyce's Ulysses, which took even me three years to finish, and it was fiction.

Craft brewers may never make it into the larger scope of history, of economic gain, because they love what they do, and because when artists are doing everything right, they are often overlooked except by those who really appreciate their work. And there are enough of us who do that this group of artists has been able to expand and provide us with better and better products made by an increasingly diverse group of hearts and minds.