The Confrontation of Expoiter and Nurturer.

As a beer enthusiast, I am constantly pitting craft beer against industrial beer. In this battle I send craft beer, a scrappy multi faceted, viral movement of passionate brewers, into the ring against industrial beer, a three headed corporate, marketing, and profit driven business.

It's not just make believe, it's a real confrontation.

Over the past eight years the overall beer market in the US has been fairly stable, growing or losing a few percentage points every year. During this same period our population has stayed relatively stable as well. What this means is that in order to sell more beer you have to persuade customers away from one of your competitors. Craft beer has been fairly good at achieving this, their rate of growth the past few years has been somewhere between 10-13%. This nod to the little guy pumps new, fresh blood into a stagnant pulse.

It is this same local, intimate care taken by craft brewers that Wendel Berry writes about in his book The Unsettling of America. Though he talks about two approaches to farming, agribusiness industrial farming and the local family farm, his voice is quite relevant. He uses two terms to define the two, exploitation and nurture. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, and hard facts with the end goal being money and profit. Whereas the nurturer thinks in terms of character, condition, quality, and kind with an end goal of health for the craft and community.

The post-industrial 'nurturing' movement of craft beer is far out-weighted by the industrial brewery's dollar, organization, technology, and marketing, yet its growth cadences on. Passion, care, and community propel beer drinkers away from industrial products and toward local and regional beer. Encouraging? Yes. An unorganized and underfunded group of closet chemists and backyard brewers demanding an audience for their well cared for vocation. Wendel Berry would be proud.