I recently moved from Britain, known for its warm beer, to the United States, land of Budweiser and Miller Lite, and also the microbrewery. The night before leaving for America, I had dinner at a pub that served a variety of styles from ale to lager to stout, all from one brewery—part of a British system that links pubs to particular producers. The pub I went to poured drinks from a local microbrewery, itself part of a movement originating in the 1970s to return to “traditional” ale culture.
Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Oxford University Press, 352 pp., $35, September 2024
A new book by Jeffrey Pilcher, a leading scholar of food history, helps to explain how the trend toward microbreweries, and their idiosyncratic and local beers, has become, ironically, a global phenomenon. In Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity, he traces how something as personal as taste—preference for a particular beer style or brand—is actually shaped by global forces and local politics.
Hopped Up is packed full of fascinating facts, from the origins of brewing to the rivalries that shaped British industrial beer brewing to the meaning behind the label “Pilsner.” Beer is a truly global product, and as such, provides ample opportunity to dip in to a huge variety of scenes moving forward through history; the book has the feel of a fast-paced jaunt in a beer-themed time machine. Different threads of history weave through the thoroughly researched text, written accessibly for the beer-lover in your life, as Pilcher traces the evolution of beer manufacturing, consumption, and marketing in Japan, Germany, the Czech Republic, Britain and its empire in Africa and South Asia, the United States, and Mexico, with plenty of other places sprinkled in for comparison along the way.
An illustration of the interior of the Pabst Brewing Co.’s Brewhouse in Milwaukee, circa 1893.Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Beer, Pilcher posits, is a drink that existed in a large variety of local forms from earliest antiquity. In its current incarnation, he argues, it has evolved alongside global capitalism into the definition of a global commodity: It can be found in nearly every country following the same production processes, which largely rely on industrial production, scientific techniques that favor standardization, and, of course, the use of hops. As a commodity, beer is ambiguously local; Pilsen, Budweis, Munich, and Vienna might have begun as signifying a locality, but unlike Champagne, they don’t carry domain of origin meaning and have been produced across the globe. Instead, names came to signify styles rather than origins.
Despite this, beer resists the uniformity and interchangeability of other globally consumed products like coffee beans or sugar grounds or cod. Each bottle is still an individuated product, and even the conglomeration of different brands under big corporations, as with the merger of AB Inbev and SABMiller, hasn’t been complete: Smaller players are still important market forces. While the truly transnational AB Inbev has a global market share of over 27 percent, the top 10 conglomerates—which also include Dutch Heineken, China’s Snow Breweries, Danish Carlsberg, Canadian Molson Coors, Chinese Tsingtao, Japanese Asahi, French Castel Group, Chinese Yanjing, and the Turkish Efes Group—still only account for 70 percent of the total global market for beer.
Read More
Are Rats Actually That Bad?
The rodent’s reputation, revamped.
How Weaponizing Food Helps Trump Win Votes
From the Irish to Italians and Chinese, food has long been used to define who is—or isn’t—a “real American.”
The Foods That ‘Changed’ the World
What happened to all those bestselling individual food histories?
A worker inspects bottles of beer at a product line of Yanjing Beer Group Corporation in Beijing on Nov. 11, 2005. China Photos/Getty Images
Part of the reason for this is the interesting tension that Pilcher identifies between the pull of globalization and commodification on the one hand, and the resistance offered by both consumer tastes and local and national politics on the other. As Pilcher argues, “One might suppose that the chronology of beer followed a progressive expansion of European domination. … But such a trajectory ignores long-term continuities as well as periods of retrenchment.” Time and again, across the centuries covered in this book, it is state regulation that plays a pivotal role in shaping the trajectory of beer. Industrialization helped to change the technical processes that made a new scale and consistency of beer production possible, and shaped new consumer markets both at home—amongst a new working class—and abroad, as empires spread their products to new peoples. But it was state regulation, and particularly the ongoing search for tax revenue by modern states, that created the pools and eddies of historical uniqueness.
For instance, one of the new technical instruments that enabled late 18th-century brewers to calculate the level of alcohol that their products would reach during fermentation, bringing a new level of standardized production on line, was originally a tool used “by tax collectors to determine the strength of alcohol in distilled liquor” in order to effectively levy the right taxes in accordance with local regulations. State regulation of beer came out of a “desire of municipal authorities to standardize, classify, and, most importantly, tax goods.” Long before the term “sin tax” took off in the 1980s, the British Empire took regulation to new heights in trying to control which kinds of beer were available to white settler and Indigenous populations through the adjustment of both legal enforcements and taxation.
A beer hall in South Africa, circa 1969. Jean-Erick Pasquier/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
In South Africa, the Durban government passed the Native Beer Act in 1908, which authorized only town councils the right to brew and serve “native” beer—that is, beer that was allowed to be served to Black South Africans. Those council breweries “sought to limit the consumption of beer by making it as unpleasant as possible” and bartenders collaborated by watering down the already sour, adulterated beer, and only allowing ticketed drinkers into regulated beer halls, where they could only have one drink before having to reenter. The proceeds from the overpriced beer halls were used for building barracks and paying police salaries. Real “native beer” continued to be brewed illicitly, using sorghum and traditional processes of fermentation in large calabashes, but the impact of British regulation still shaped even these beers. Hops were added because they were banned and therefore desirable, and traditional beers “likewise adapted under colonialism, becoming more alcoholic with new ingredients and brewing techniques.”
Homogenization and globalization were forces that encountered opposition from local taste and government regulation, but consumers and the state also operated against each other to create further nuances to the spread of hopped beer. As Pilcher summarizes it, “tastes for novel drinks were situated within existing social contexts while responding to their unique sensory characteristics.” Nationalists, colonial officials, and consumers had conflicting ideas about what beer symbolized: Was it modern or traditional? Was it imperial and bourgeois, or local and the drink of the working man? Was it associated with men (its primary drinkers) or women (its primary producers across a surprising range of geographies and time periods)?
Sometimes those contradictions manifested in the challenges facing national and imperial governments in regulating their own producers and consumers, as was the case with Prohibition in the United States. Japan’s consumers encountered American beer with Commodore Matthew Perry’s first fleet in 1854, declaring the liquid reminiscent of “bitter horse piss” in contrast with the locally brewed, fruitier rice beer, sake; but before long, the modernizing Meiji government embraced lager as a drink that would demonstrate that country’s belonging to the advanced imperial nations. For the Chinese communist government after their victory in 1949, local beer production became a national priority. Pilcher recounts that the Ministry of Light Industry put its weight behind the establishment of a new model brewery, which would be established with the help of the Russians, as a competitor for the domestic market to the colonial-era Qingdao (Tsingtao). The Russian-backed brewery, a symbol of the Sino-Soviet alliance, lasted only as long as that relationship. By 1964, the state had turned back to Qingdao, which was preferred by consumers, to learn what they could about its production. But the state also shaped consumption by deciding to qualify Qingdao for national distribution, not only for export.
Men drink pints of beer at the Great British Beer Festival in London on Aug. 1, 2006.Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
Pilcher identifies the global resurgence of craft, local, and alternative beers that began in the 1970s as a movement of producer and consumer resistance to the “hegemony of mass-produced pale lager.” In Belgium, that resistance came via the Gruut City Brewery, which started experimenting in 2009 with gruit beers, inspired by medieval recipes that didn’t use hops. The brewer, Annick De Splenter, came from a family of brewers, and her new approach became a popular alternative. Her success inspired the takeoff of a global unhopped beer trend. Yet this example isn’t really offered by Pilcher as a counterexample to beer’s fundamental relationship with capitalism: Instead, Pilcher points out, craft beer—with its appeal to different tastes and subcultures—has been possible exactly because of the market segmentation and advertising data, supply chains and efficient brewing technology that mass production and conglomeration facilitated. The Boston Beer Company, for instance, started as a microbrewery, but linking the product to the Revolutionary War patriot, Samuel Adams, and framing the company as an underdog through its advertising added what Pilcher describes as “another dimension to the experience of taste.”
Attending the local Oktoberfest in my new home of Pennsylvania recently, it was easy to see how a craft beer counterculture has shaped the emergence of a new set of tastes. Microbreweries offered West Coast-style IPAs, hazy New England-style pale ales, spiced German-style lagers, and a pumpkin ale made with authentic Fuller’s British yeast. All were made locally, in Pennsylvania, at breweries that were allowed under the state’s labyrinthine alcohol regulations to offer “farmers market” tastings. The stories in Hopped Up illustrate how, time and again, these kinds of interactions between brewers, regulators, and consumers have helped to create new beer cultures. The pumpkin ale I was particularly happy to see on offer is one such example—made with real pumpkins, derived from colonial era recipes. Consumer demand for a countercultural and autumnal alternative to the ubiquitous lite lagers during football season gave rise to the success of pumpkin ales in the United States, but these brews have limited appeal elsewhere, including back in the U.K, where they aren’t available. Beer may be a global drink, but which beer you drink remains influenced by the local.