Anat Baron does not drink alcohol. Somewhat regrettably, she is allergic to it. That restriction, however, did not stop her from becoming, in 2001, the chief executive officer of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Mike’s, a popular product among younger generations of drinkers, is one of the “little guys” of the beer industry[1]: an independent group doing battle against the giants of the trade. Although Baron’s career at Mike’s lasted only several years, she learned very quickly the dynamics of the business. As she moved on in her career, Baron progressed into the realm of the arts through the medium of filmmaking. But Baron would not soon forget her experience in the beer industry. In 2007, she embarked on her biggest journey in the arena of filmmaking to date: Baron began work on Beer Wars, a documentary that provided an insight into an industry that so many people knew very little about.

Beer Wars takes a multi-pronged approach to educate the viewer on the truth behind the beer industry. The film is divided into three primary segments; the first is a look into the history of the beer industry, and an education on how it got to be where it is in the present day. This portion of the film discusses how the industry post-prohibition was one of sameness and dominance by the massive corporate brands. One of the first (of a great many) interviews to be featured in the film then brings up the tension and primary conflict to be explained in the film; namely, the microbrew revolution. This is the idea that the trend in beer sales is moving away from the three major corporations (Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors) to consumption from smaller craft beer breweries. Four minutes into the film is the first mention of the flagging dominance of the triumvirate of mega-corporations in power: an MSNBC clip discusses the surge in microbrew sales (specifically in 2009) in a period in which beer as a whole is on the decline. Indeed, in and around the time frame when Baron created the film, craft beer sales and production have surged. According to the Brewers Association, an organization formed “to promote and protect small and independent American brewers, their craft beers and the community of brewing enthusiasts,” growth was substantial: “Growth of the craft brewing industry in 2011 was 13% by volume and 15% by dollars compared to growth in 2010 of 12% by volume and 15% by dollars.” In this way, Beer Wars came at the perfect time to make the ultimate splash in not only the beer industry but also in the public eye.

The seeds of the craft beer revolution were planted in the late 1970s, when president Jimmy Carter repealed Prohibition laws that had banned all small-scale brewing operations, including home brewing[2]. An insignificantly sized but highly motivated core of beer-lovers reveled in the new litigation, beginning their own brewing processes and creating the economic and manufacturing infrastructure that would further the movement for others in the future. By the mid-1990s, small-scale breweries were opening at a rate of nearly two per week. It was around this time that two breweries heavily featured in the film, Stone Brewing Company and Dogfish Head Brewery, opened in California and Delaware respectively. 15 years later, these two breweries lead the sales explosion of craft beer. Beer Wars rode the crest of this surge, both inciting viewer interest in the market segment and benefiting from its very new and very real expanded marketability. The documentary was well timed to further chip away at the conglomerate of corporations that it posed itself against.

This is almost all good news for the microbrewers; however, as promising as the horizon may be for the small-timers, the behemoth of the mega-corporations still remains very much intact. Despite the little guys’ success, the big guys remain the unequivocal leaders. In 2007, Miller and Coors joined forces to try to combat the Anheuser-Busch brand. As of 2011, these two brewers combined for an astonishing 70 percent of a $96 billion market.

It is precisely this domination that Anat Baron sought to undermine, both in her time at the helm of Mike’s Hard Lemonade and behind the camera in Beer Wars. There are myriad structural and popular obstacles upon which Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors maintain a firm grasp. Dishearteningly, these obstacles are ingrained in both the social values of modern America and the political sphere. In this way, Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors have created a dominant hegemonic structure in which the smaller brewing companies must operate. Baron uses Beer Wars to combat the strength of this hegemony, and she wastes no time in making this abundantly clear. In minute five of the film, Baron effectively offers the thesis behind which the text will move forward: “On one side is corporate America, doing everything it can to win at all costs. On the other side, are small brewers, who are challenging the status quo.”

“Beer has become a commodity”

Prohibition is far and away the single most important and influential moment in the history of beer in America. It’s imposition caused the demise of hundreds of local and regional breweries. Indeed, this local landscape in which beer was produced and consumed prior to 1919 was the only one that existed. After prohibition ended, and the alcohol industries were more regulated, the current, nationally oriented landscape of beer production began to emerge. Perhaps most important in the restructuring of the landscape, and the driving factor behind the dominance of a few corporations in the market, is the introduction of television.

George Lipsitz, in Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, discusses the manner in which television not only became an extremely popular and accessible form of media, but one that is shaped by the economics of advertising. The government not only aided in the development of television as a successful medium, it fatefully chose the direction by which the sustainability of the medium could be insured: in television’s nascent years between 1948 and 1952, government policies ensured that advertising-oriented programming based on the model of radio would triumph over theater television, educational television, or any other form. Government decisions, not market forces, established the dominance of commercial television, but these decisions reflected a view of the American economy and its needs which had become so well accepted at the top levels of business and government that it had virtually become the official state economic policy. (Lipsitz 45-46)

This history is particularly relevant to Dick Yuengling, who is the fifth-generation owner of D. G. Yuengling and Sons. This Pottsville, Pennsylvania brewery is the oldest in America, surviving economic fluctuation and Prohibition to stay in business for more than 175 years. It is one of the most successful microbreweries in America, creating a sizable contingent of loyal followers in the mid- and south-Atlantic. Dick Yuengling laments the television revolution, claiming that it pushed the market from local and regional beer preferences to an advertising-dominated system, saying, “[breweries] all had beers with particular taste and character to ‘em, and the people in those cities…liked that beer, so that’s what they supported. As television brought in the national brands, the beer just got more bland.” Despite this perceived blandness, the commercials found a captive audience; Americans flocked to the beers that they saw on television and away from their regional preferences.

The success of the national brands that advertisement created only served to bring further commercial success, as television ads became more prevalent in American society. The 1960s and 1970s saw the beer advertising business boom, as it blossomed into the omnipresent media behemoth that it is today[3]. In 2007, the beer advertising industry worked with a total of nearly a billion dollars. Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors (the latter of which was still two corporations at the time) accounted for the vast majority of that total[4]. The national corporations put enormous amounts of money into the creation, via advertisement, of a distinct role and need that beer would fill.

The opening scene of Beer Wars is a montage that includes a number of old-fashioned images in the beer industry. Primarily advertisements, these clips and images familiarize and romanticize American consumption of beer with pleasant voiceovers and warmth in camerawork that harkens back to the halcyon days of a bygone era. One clip in this introduction is of the popular sitcom Cheers, which further establishes this motif. Among the advertisements in the opening sequence is a spot for an unnamed (but presumably national) brand in which a group of everymen finds relaxation and comfort in a shared round of beers. American beer producers were actively defining what beer consumption in America meant, portraying their product in a light in which it had not been seen before. These images were strong enough to change behavior and attitudes toward beer, much to the delight of the corporations.

The prevalence of advertising created an arms race for the consumer dollar. In order to spend more money on advertising, costs had to be slashed, and the integrity of the product suffered. The result of overhead cost cuts was a group of beers, advertised on a national (and often even international) scale, that were nearly indistinguishable from one another. Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors beers were (and are) “startlingly homogenous, engineered for consistency rather than potential perfection, characterized almost by the absence of any distinct taste.” This blandness in taste and uniformity in production, as discussed by Yuengling, became the hallmark of American beer. But rather than revolt against the monotony, the American people bought into it. Resulting from the propagation of homogeneity of the product was the growth of the illusion of choice. Customers fully believed in their autonomy and ability to choose for themselves the beer that they preferred, even though they were blind to the sameness of that which they consumed. Frankfurt school thinkers Adorno and Horkeimer critiqued American media and the uniformity that it propagates:

How formalised the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end. That the difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products is basically illusory strikes every child with a keen interest in varieties. What connoisseurs discuss as good or bad points serve only to perpetuate the semblance of competition and range of choice.

Adorno and Horkeimer correctly identify that the range in products is entirely illusory. Connoisseurism is not even possible in the instance of national brand beer; indeed, the products are so similar that they cannot be told apart. This was true in the burgeoning days of the megacorporations, and remains so today. In a very telling and humorous scene in Beer Wars, Baron goes to a bar and offers a blind taste test to unsuspecting patrons. Covered under paper bags are three bottles of beer: Bud Light, Miller Light, and Coors Light, respectively the 1st, 3rd, and 4th best selling beers in America[5]. Before they are asked to try the beers, Baron asks each which they prefer. There is substantial variation; each beer has its proponents, and each proponent is as convinced of his preference as the last. These drinkers love their beer, and consider themselves devotees of the brand; they did not even think to question their ability to identify their personal favorite. When tested, however, none of the ten tasters shown in the film could correctly identify which brand they were drinking. For the most part, they reacted with a sort of subdued shock.

Thorough relentless advertising, the national beer brands created zombified followers that are more than happy to shill for their brand. By creating a homogenous product that is inexpensive, accessible, and popular, Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors have boxed competitors out of the market. The established brand has such power and cachet that there is no hope of competitor entry. Adorno and Horkeimer spoke to the fruitlessness of opposition in the context of media, but the lessons parallel the beer market very closely:

[Radio] is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the apocryphal field of the “amateur,” and also have to accept organisation from above.

Grassroots competitors are excluded from genuine competition because they are required by the established hegemony to play by the rules, eliminating the possibility of knocking down the big guns, or even leveling the playing field.

Typical American beer consumers are oppressed in their consumption habits. They consume cheap, boring beer and are convinced that they love it. On a theoretical model of beer consumption, there are a host of variables that would enter the purchasing equation: taste, price, alcohol content, and the business ethics of the producer are just a few. In many (and perhaps most) cases, Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors would not win the purchase of the consumer. Their clout in the arena of advertising is a self-sustaining cycle of success, impressing values on the consuming public that tears them away from whatever their own personal value hierarchies might be. Dick Yuengling claimed, “people get fed up with corporate America jamming down the consumer’s throat what they want to.” Consciously, this is probably a thought that much of America shares; no one would admit to herself that she was a slave to corporate hegemony. In actuality, however, this is how much of America behaves. They buy in to the messages of Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors, and it defines them as consumers of beer. Perhaps the most distressing thing about this state of affairs is that the hegemonic oppression does not come only from the beer companies themselves.

From All Sides

The final third of the film takes the viewer out of the quaint, small-scale breweries and out of heartfelt, humanizing interviews with craft brewers and the industry analysts who fight for them. Baron plants us firmly in Washington, D.C., which is perhaps the most important battleground in the Beer Wars. As she does several times in the film, Baron adeptly uses spontaneous interviews with passers-by to illustrate an instance in which the average person or beer consumer knows far less about the origins of their beer than they thought they did. In this third section of the film, lawmakers in the capital come under the microscope. Again, Prohibition is a key factor.

By 1933, the repeal of Prohibition was widely acknowledged as politically necessary, and Congress acted with a constitutional amendment. The move did not come without its caveats, however. Historical precedence from both before and during Prohibition informed lawmakers in creating the aforementioned increased regulation in the industry. One of the most important beer-related laws that were enacted at that time was an artificially created middleman between producer and consumer. The two were no longer permitted to conduct business directly, and so the business of beer distribution was born.

This linear arrangement of beer consumption, from producer to distributor to retailer, has come to be known as the three-tier system. Baron notes that it was put in place with the idea that it would function much like the United States government: three separate but equal branches that have equal control over each other. Unsurprisingly, this failed. Over 90% of the business that the wholesalers (another name for distributors) do is from Anheuser-Busch or MillerCoors. As Charlie Papazian, president of the aforementioned Brewer’s Association, warns in an interview, “of course [the distributors] have to pay attention to the large companies.” The three-tier system was legislated in such a way that it would be operated on a state level, and states were further divided into territories. Two or three large wholesalers typically dominate the territories, and because these distributors can choose whom they distribute, they are heavily influenced (and even controlled) by the national brands. As one wholesaler explains with regard to Anheuser-Busch, “they have very deep pockets, so they can make almost anything happen.” Small brewers have an incredibly difficult time finding room for their beers on a delivery truck that is stocked full with Anheuser-Busch or MillerCoors products. The problem is compounded by the impregnable nature of the shipping infrastructure; a distributor is far more likely to ship a beer that is proven to sell successfully, but the smaller beers cannot prove their capacity to sell without a berth opening for them on the trucks.

Failed government regulation in the private sector, however, is not remarkable unto itself. The real issue is that, despite obvious and significant structural breakdown in the three-tier system, in the form of an amalgamation of the biggest[6] two thirds of that system, the American government remains firm in their endorsement of the legislation. After demonstrating the profound flaws of the three-tier system, Baron shows a video produced by National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA) singing the system’s praises. The NBWA is a trade union armed with lobbyists that represents the interests of the distributors. This union is indelibly tied to legislators on Capitol Hill; the powerful lobby is able to shape lawmaking so that it most benefits them. And it is not just the legislative branch in which the NBWA is burrowed deeply, it is also the executive; in addition to powerful and wealthy lobbyist forces, the NBWA Political Action Committee has been the second largest contributor to political campaigns in 2011-12, committing almost $1.5 Billion. This figure is spread roughly 60/40 to Republicans and Democrats, respectively.

This wedding of the private and public sector is a key symptom of the pervasive Neoliberal ideals that have come to define the American superstructure, according to theorist Wendy Brown. Brown argues that market ideals are “constructed — organized by law and political institutions, and requiring political intervention orchestration. Far from flourishing when left alone, the economy must be directed, buttressed, and protected by law and policy” in order to survive. And while the corrupt, profit-maximizing collaboration of the private and public arenas is problematic enough on its own, what it demonstrates to us about our own culture of Neoliberalism is perhaps far more dangerous.

In Brown’s theory, the political intervention in the economic sphere is executed thoroughly, with one clear goal in mind: the imposition of “market rationality” on culture and people. This is manifest in the phenomenon that “not only is the human being configured exhaustively as homo æconomicus, but all dimensions of human life are cast in terms of a market rationality” (Brown 40). The hegemonic superstructure, in this case dominated by the massive corporations and their puppets in Congress, imposes ideals among the masses that a market rationale is the natural one by which we ought to operate. This transition has been, in many ways, successful. Rational consumption is perceived as a positive behavior, and much of American thought is framed in terms of cost/benefit analysis. Sam Calagione, an independent brewer, demonstrates the danger behind the rational frame of reference in consumption, saying,

“Anheuser-Busch is doing [their own versions of products branded to look like craft beers], and I don’t want to see Anheuser-Busch’s $3.99 six-pack of pumpkin beer next to my $7.99 four-pack of pumpkin beer. I know what it took to get us into that bottle…. If that product isn’t made with the care that the small breweries make it with, it might turn that consumer off from ever wandering to that craft section again.”

Price takes preference over so many factors because of the fear of irrational expenditure of resources. The pervasiveness of this rationalist ideal is especially troubling given the perceived impossibility of alternatives.

The antithesis of Calagione is David Rehr, head lobbyist for the NBWA. Rehr, who Baron subtly paints as one of the most unlikeable figures that we meet in Beer Wars, is first seen declaring his pride in the political sway that his organization has maintained. The wide-reaching net of the NBWA is specifically cited by Rehr as a point of pride; every congressional district has an NBWA representative, most of whom are influential with their congressional counterpart. The message behind the words is clear: Rehr believes that the ultimate goal in the beer industry is profit maximization. This mindset is transferred to his consumers in inescapable ways. The hegemony creates a stable of homogeneous products, maximizing profit in every possible manner. The consumer public is removed from the human, personal, and artistic view of beer that brewers like Calagione strive so hard to promote. The buyer believes in her personal choice, but is actually just enabling the profit-seekers’ pursuit.

In his featured interview, Rehr claims that he connects the beer producers with Washington to promote a “pro-beer agenda.” But this pro-beer agenda can only be true when understood within a strictly capitalist mindset. For Rehr, “pro-beer” and “pro-profit” are interchangeable. The more successful he and his lobby can be in enforcing the three-tier system and myriad other vehicles by which they dominate business, the better. By throwing around their fiscal and political weight, Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors, and the political sphere create a world in which only profit matters; the calculus of input and output is believed to be the consumer’s best mechanism for decision-making and consumption.

“This Machine Kills Fascist Beer Styles”

Upon first viewing, Beer Wars fits very neatly under the umbrella of the David and Goliath archetype. Indeed, Baron admits on her website[7] to framing the narrative in that familiar tale. Stuart Hall, in his essay “Encoding, Decoding”, discusses the manner in which messages are input into texts and which are taken out by the receiver. The parallels (or disconnects) between these messages are meaningful, and ultimately determine the impact of the text. In the case of Beer Wars, this message is occasionally muddled, and sometimes dangerously so. Hall calls for the producers of media to create a message and communicate it clearly: “at a certain point, however, the broadcasting structures must yield encoded messages in the form of meaningful discourse” (Hall 93). In the context of Hall’s essay, the dominant hegemonic media producers come under scrutiny for the ideologies they instill within the decoder of the message. Baron and Beer Wars obviously do not conform to this target of Hall’s; the text is encoded as liberatory one, aiming to undercut hegemonic superstructure in the beer industry.

Boxoffice magazine reviewed the film positively, praising the film for its revelation of the underbelly of a corrupted industry, saying, “it’s also a pretty damning indictment of not just the beer industry but contemporary unfettered unregulated capitalism’s disturbing excesses.”[8] This review takes what Hall classifies as the dominant-hegemonic position of decoding, “when the viewer takes the connoted meaning from [media] full and straight…in terms of the reference code in which it was encoded.” Baron’s tacit approval of the review (as demonstrated by its display on her web site) indicates the consistency of the encoded message and this decoding. However, while that message would purport to be anti-capitalist, it is far from it.

Beer Wars’ most significant ideological departure from being an anti-capitalist text is Baron’s repeated emphasis on the American Dream. This concept appears as Baron sets up the film in its opening frames, and again in her closing thoughts. The issue with this emphasis is that the American Dream is a profoundly capitalist ideal. In “The Social Logic of Consumption,” Jean Baudrillard combats the idea that American Dream-esque ideals are democratic in any way. The white picket fence, suburban motifs of the American Dream rely on the value of equality as an instrument to happiness. Baudrillard disagrees, saying, “the myth of happiness is the one which, in modern societies, takes up and comes to embody the myth of Equality” (Baudrillard Chap. 4). The problem arises from the phenomenon of externalization of happiness; as equality pervades the collective psychology, happiness no longer comes from within. Further problematic for Baudrillard is the emphasis on a quantification of adherence to the egalitarian ideal. Appropriate idealization of equality would not remove it from its internal locus; however, our perception of equality, and therefore happiness, is altogether too often grounded in the material: “the democratic principle is then transferred from a real equality of capacities, of responsibilities, of social chances and of happiness (in the full sense of the term) to an equality before the Object and other manifest signs of social success and happiness” (Baudrillard 4). Baron repeatedly (both implicitly and explicitly) incites the American Dream trope. Her position seems to be more anti-monopolistic than truly anti-capitalist; the largest corporations are viewed as evil, corroborating with an unsympathetic government to squeeze the Davids out of the market. But the goal of the microbrewers themselves never had anything to do with market share, advertising dollars, or sales revenue.

Calagione, by far the most likable (and most prominent) character in the film, runs the aforementioned Dogfish Head brewery. Dogfish Head is one of the most popular craft brews in America, leading sales in the mid-Atlantic region[9]. But it is made clear time and time again in the film; this is not why Sam Calagione brews. Big breweries, which are public companies, are aimed at maximizing profit and shareholder value; microbreweries like his own, however, Calagione says maintain a goal of “the flavor of what we’re making for our own enjoyment as the people making it.” He consciously breaks down the homogeneous nature of beer availability, straying from a safe, profitable strategy to produce a product that he truly cherishes and with which he identifies. Splayed across the wall in the brewhouse is the slogan “Beer and Benevolence”; Calagione makes clear that this is a motto to live and brew by, rather than a public relations ploy. Each Dogfish Head bottle reads “Off-centered stuff for off-centered people.” The difference between that message and Budweiser’s is stark; the bland, watery lager brashly pronounces itself “King of Beers.”

Craft brewers are artisans, not economists. In discussing the population of a convention full of independent brewers, Calagione says, “Most of the guys in this room are a bunch of freaky, radical folk artists.” Samuel Adams founder Jim Koch describes himself and his breed as “lunatics at the fringe.” This ethos pervades the class of people that run craft breweries. It is not about the money; though most microbrewers do what they can to create successful beer, capitalistic competition amongst each other is not foremost on the collective consciousness. There is an endearing unity in the microbrew crowd; Calagione says of his brewery, “There’s hundreds just like it in America that are…different size and different scale, but they all really have the same function which is putting a hurting on the bland, domestic lagers that dominate American beer culture.” Words like “pride”, “soul”, and “people” are frequently heard from Calagione, firmly establishing the motivation for his brewing. Perhaps his most telling quote, however, unquestionably putting to bed the notion that he’s after profit and market share: “you know, I’m proud of this 100-barrel brewhouse, but I’m proud to say my buddies at Stone have a brewery this big, my buddies at New Belgium have one two or three times [the size].”

Calagione and Dogfish Head are not the only one to express this pride in product and humanistic business ethos. Most every craft brewer in Beer Wars embodies those ideals in different ways. It is in this sense that the film is truly liberatory in a Marxist sense. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx lays the groundwork for one of the central tenets of his philosophy. Marx argues that there exists a natural and fulfilling relationship between laborer and labor that is a fundamental component of humanity. Capitalism tears down this bond by reallocating the product of labor in the hands of a few; competition is a “war among the greedy” (Manuscripts). The loss of connection to the product as a result of capitalism creates an objectification, and dehumanization, of the object of labor. This is egregiously problematic, argues Marx, for “So much does the objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the most essential objects…of life.” The livelihood of the laborer is stripped away by the alienation from product.

The most useful decoding of Beer Wars is as a liberatory piece on the connection of labor to the objects being created. Post-Prohibition, the marketing might of the large national beer brands created an indefatigable monolith of capitalist power. The macrobreweries grew to produce an appallingly homogeneous and subpar product. The capitalist system created an environment in which financial success of the product begat more success. Consumers were inundated by advertisements that were no more heterogeneous than the products that they hoped to sell. Suspect cooperation between the government and the private sector, coupled with cutthroat price competition, helped to create and enforce a rational economic ideology. Beer came to be defined as a single entity, with a single taste and color and feel, and variety in the industry was unheard of for several decades.

But the microbrew revolution began to chip away at this perception of beer as more and more producers and consumers began to understand that beer could exist outside capitalist markets. Sam Calagione and his ilk created an industrial sector that is anything but industrial; craft brewing is about pride in product, quality craftsmanship, and the human connection created in a bottle of damn good beer.

[1] Though it comes as a surprise to many, Mike’s and similar products are considered beer. They are produced using the same fermentation process, using sugar rather than hops or wheat to create the desired flavor.