Courtesy The Brewers Association
The other day I was enjoying a beer on my porch when my neighbor, who lives a luxurious ten feet away, came out of his garage lecturing his friend about the evils of Wal-Mart. His friend, who floated lazily behind him on a skateboard, remained silent. My neighbor went on to say he hadn’t shopped there for years and stopped going to McDonald’s as well, since they were epitomes of capitalist nonsense (I’m paraphrasing). His friend attempted an ollie in the driveway.
His fervor surprised me because it’s not the usual rhetoric I hear spouted in neighborhoods like mine, which is to say, poor ones in central Ohio. It cheered me to hear someone outside my little blue bubble of artist friends who understood what megagiagantoconglamamarts do to the local economy. The word is spreading, my friends. And just as the buy local and eat local movements are gaining ground, so the drink local fad is rapidly becoming not a fad.
Allow me to share some statistics directly from the Brewers Association, a nonprofit trade association that supports small and independent American brewers. They will blow your hops off! In 2013, there were a total of 2,822 breweries in the US. Of those, 2,768 were craft breweries. That’s 98%!
Naturally, the volume of craft beer made and sold is considerably lower than what the commercial breweries put out, a mere 14.3 billion dollar-share of the 100 billion dollar beer market. But while overall beer sales were down 1.9% in 2013, craft beer sales were up 17.2%.
What these statistics say to me — and statistics rarely say anything to me — is that my personal crusade to convert everyone I meet into a craft beer drinker has been working! (You say you don’t like beer, but really you just haven’t met the right one yet, I say to one skeptical Jack and Diet drinker after another.) This is my crusade and, of course, that of every other craft beer aficionado out there. Because there’s nothing like a little buzz to make one sermonize on suds.
Photo by Rasul K. Welch
Nowadays you don’t have to do it on your own either. There are organizations like Support Your Local Brewery (SYLB), that provide you with the information and the platform with which to make your country and your state a craft beer-friendly place to live. They tackle issues like Kansas’ laws against serving homebrew anywhere outside the home and a bill in Mississippi’s House that would be detrimental to small craft brewers. In part, their action helped make homebrewing legal in Alabama, which happened only a year ago.
Last week I went with my husband to Locavore, an exhibit of food art — both photographs and the edible kind. All the ingredients were from the area: locally grown, grain-fed meat; breads from a nearby bakery; olive oils and vinegars from the shop next door; and a viney weed that grew in the chef’s backyard. All of it was served with a deceptively strong gin drink made with 25-year-old balsamic vinegar (holy macaroni, that was good!) and growlers of beer from the brewery around the corner. I left the dinner with a beatific smile on my face, feeling many things: full, warm, healthy, and like a good person — but not in a self-righteous way, more like I was actively a part of my community, connected to everyone in it, and contributing positively to its growth. Maybe it was the glass of Redemption IPA, but small felt very big, indeed.