THE VALUE OF A PINT: A CULTURAL ECONOMY OF AMERICAN BEER J. Nikol Beckham A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Communication Studies (Cultural Studies). Chapel Hill 2014 Approved by: Lawrence Grossberg Sarah Dempsey Jay Garcia Michael Palm John Pickles © 2014 J. Nikol Beckham ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT J. Nikol Beckham: The Value of a Pint: A Cultural Economy of American Beer (Under the direction of Lawrence Grossberg) As a material commodity beer has remained surprisingly unchanged since its discovery— composed of roughly the same ingredients, combined in roughly the same proportions, to achieve roughly the same product. What has been in dramatic flux, particularly over the past 100 years, is how beer is valued. This dissertation considers the numerous and complex ways beer has been and continues to be woven into the fabric of contemporary American life. Changes in the valuation of beer—for instance beer valued as a uniquely taxable and critically profitable source of depression-era internal revenue; as a means of supporting U.S. troops during WWII; as an exemplar of achievable value-added through branding; as a racialized social ill; as a catalyst for technological innovation in packaging and distribution; as emblematic of American masculinity; or as a touchstone of activism advocating sustainable practices of producing, distributing and consuming food and drink—are most often narrowly cast as products of economic change or products of cultural change. In crafting a historically and contextually contingent cultural economy of American beer, this project frames such changes as a complex articulation of the two and in doing so, advances a theory of culturally embedded valuation. iii For my mother and father and each of the colored mothers and fathers before them. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The completion of this dissertation is without question the most difficult challenge I have ever dared to face and my greatest and most cherished accomplishment. Without the support of the following people, I would have never mustered the courage to write the first page. It is because of their collective guidance, insight, encouragement, patience, and generosity that I was able to write the last. To them, I owe my deepest gratitude. I would first like to thank my advisor, Dr. Lawrence Grossberg who took me seriously when I proposed conducting my doctoral dissertation research about beer. He has not only been a kind mentor, but has modeled a fearlessness, rigor, open-mindedness and dedication to Cultural Studies that will inspire me throughout my career. Because of him, I will never question the importance of intellectual work in the pursuit of social change. I would like to thank Dr. Sarah Dempsey for sharing with me a scholarly passion for food and tremendous editorial clarity; Dr. Jay Garcia for being one of the most generous and helpful readers that has ever engaged my writing; Dr. Michael Palm for the incisive questions that helped shape the earliest versions of the theories of valuation presented in this dissertation; and Dr. John Pickles for offering the single most useful piece of advice I received over the course of conducting this research. I would like to thank Dr. Julia Wood, from whom I never took a class, but in whose counsel I spent many hours. Had it not been for a serendipitous hug she offered to an adoring first year Master’s student at the UNC party at the Annual Meeting of the National v Communication Association in San Antonio, I would not be the graduating doctoral candidate I am today. Deepest gratitude to Dr. Valerie Renegar, my Master’s thesis advisor, who taught me that uncompromising excellence and boisterous laughter can gracefully coexist. I would like to thank the Royster Society of Fellows at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Without the financial support of the William Neal Reynolds Fellowship, I would not have been able to attend such a prestigious institution of higher education. I would like to thank Dr. Richard Quinn. First, for allowing me to put my mark on the homebrew supply and equipment division of Fifth Season Gardening Company; I would not have been able to complete this project without the industry contacts, experiences, and expertise I developed during my three years as his employee. Second, I thank him for showing me that a Ph.D. can lead to a life of self-directed joy and success outside of the academy. I offer thanks to my closest companions who repeatedly risked becoming collateral damage to this dissertation by stubbornly maintaining relationships with me. I could have never have accomplished this without their loyalty, care, pep talks, willingness to listen, creative infusions, perspective, coddling, impromptu happy hours and good-natured humoring: Lisa Shaffer, Mary Donnan Debranski, Thomas Condon, and Carolyn Hardin, you are wonderful people and even better friends. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Shanna Jackson for quietly enduring and vocally loving me—for allowing me the opportunity to chase the best me, knowing that I would not for one minute face this challenge alone. vi PREFACE Beer. “What?” It’s about beer. “What is?” My dissertation. You asked what my dissertation is about and it’s about beer. “That’s so cool! So it’s about marketing and branding and stuff like that?” Yeah…stuff the like that. Actually it is nothing like that, but the story that is punctuated with the writing of this dissertation is a bit too long and far too meandering to tell in passing. It is a story better suited for a preface. My love affair with beer began in Blacksburg, VA during a short stretch as an employee of the Rivermill Map Company Bar and Grill. As far as part-time employment options for undergraduate students were concerned, my gig at the Rivermill was choice. Though the pay was no better than any other restaurant in the small mountain town, the hours longer, and the work somewhat more demanding; there was a certain kind of cachet that came along with working at a popular night spot and the hard work often came along with equally hard play. Looking back, I see now that the Rivermill ostensibly offered a kind of left-leaning populist approach to service labor that I did not yet have the Marxist education to appreciate. Everyone did everything without exception, from bartending to cooking to cleaning urinals and checking IDs at the door. The collegiality felt within our relatively non-hierarchical gaggle of job title- vii free employees was no more evident than at the end of the night when we enjoyed a free shift beer. It was in these moments, in the company of my coworkers, and with the basest of intentions, that my indoctrination into the world of ‘good’ beer began. If I am going to be given a free beer at the end of the night, it is damn well going to be the most expensive thing in the house. In this way, incrementally, and always well after last call, I tasted my way through the modest selection of good beer available in southwest Virginia in the late 1990s. Like many others who find themselves sliding into the world of craft beer, I quickly found the distinctions I’d previously used to parse my beer drinking options (‘light’ and ‘dark’, ‘bitter’ and ‘sweet, ‘micro’ and ‘import’) embarrassingly inadequate. As I dipped a toe, and then several others, into an American craft brewing scene that was on the cusp of a tectonic expansion, the Heinekens, Newcastles, and Guinness Stouts that previously represented the apex of my beer purchasing aspirations were revealed to be mass-produced imports that expressed little creativity and represented something of an ‘old guard’ with respect to the interpretation of beer styles in the U.S. and abroad. The rest, as they say, is history. My own is dotted with a number of timely and formative moments. Shortly after completing my undergraduate degree, I was given a subscription to the venerable Michael Jackson’s1 Beer of the Month Club as a birthday gift. I still consider it among the best I have ever received. Though the number of locally and regionally brewed American craft beers had significantly spiked in the early years of the new millennium, distribution laws and practices still had much catching up to do; the expansive craft beer media infrastructure— 1 Michal Jackson (1942-2007) was one of the world’s preeminent beer and whiskey journalists. Though a British writer who largely published in the U.K., his books on beer have sold more than 3 million copies worldwide. He is largely credited with helping to kick off the renaissance in beer appreciation in the US, by introducing Americans to the notion of beer styles, style specific glassware, and structured tasting strategies. His life is the subject of the 2011 documentary film Beer Hunter. viii replete with magazines, tasting and review websites, and beer-related social media platforms— was several years from emerging; and a number of American states maintained laws restricting the sale of beers with alcohol contents higher than most macrobrewed commercial offerings. Outside of my monthly delivery of obscure local beers from around the country, there were few ways to taste a large number of local craft beers without traveling to find them. As fortune would have it, at the time I was working for a company that performed needs analyses for proposed affordable housing developments seeking to secure federally funded Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC).