Crafting a life
1843magazine.com
1843magazine.com
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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 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.
Prohibition also had a big impact on the alcohol business in the US.
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.
> 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.
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.
What earnings, what capital? When no one has any, it has no value - value is assigned by the people using it.
The robots, and that which they produce
Pickles don't play much of a role in my life, so I'm a bit skeptical of the new pickle and beer economy.