The Celebrity of Beer

Fred McMurray for Blatz.
Now, he was a beer celebrity.

This past Saturday I was lucky enough to get invited to the Craft New York beer fest in Albany, by Ethan Cox, from Community Beerworks. It was fun. I had some great beer, some really fantastic food, and I got the chance to meet some new folks for the first time. In fact, Ethan myself and Matt Whalen from Hamilton New York's Good Nature Brewing had pretty fantastic conversation about farm breweries and the New York Brewer's Association (the organizer of the event) role in helping to move that initiative along. All in all it was a great evening

But I was struck by something I overheard.

A rather well known, local beer blogger was asked by someone what he was doing after the festival to which he responded that he was "just gonna hang out with some of the brewers" at the hotel bar. But why would he want to do that? He just spent three hours sampling beer, with the very same people he was going to sit at the bar with. Granted some of those brewers may have been friends—friends, perhaps he hadn't seen in a while. I suppose that they may have been to busy during the festival to really catch up. Maybe, but maybe not.

Now, I want to make this clear, what I'm about to write is in no way, shape, or form an indictment of this fellow. I don't know him and I don't care one way or the other what he wants to do with his time, but observing from a close distance, he seemed a bit like a groupie—a brewer groupie.

I've starred to notice that brewers are being diety-ized deified. I'm not talking about a generalized noting of the accomplishments of say Fritz Maytag or Peter Celis. I'm not even talking about acknowledging the business prowess of Peter Swinburne or Jim Koch. I mean there is a celebrit-zing of brewers. The New York Times, just yesterday, ran an article about the rivalry between Mikkel Bjergso of Mikkeller and his twin brother Jeppe, the founder of Evil Twin. Apparently these two jut can't get along and we're supposed to care. I'm not sure why we're supposed to care, but we are. Isn't that tabloid fodder? Sam Caligone had, and Martin Dickie and James Watt, from Scotland's Brew Dog, have a TV show for fuck's sake! Brewers went from simply being a folks who make beer, to some kind of beer making gurus. But like Frank Zappa said, what kind of guru are you? More importantly, this whole nonsensical adoration has going to some of their heads—and I'm not talking about beer foam.

The food world has been going through this for a while (actually I like Guy Fieri). But be it beer or food, the focus is being shifted away from the product to the producer. When that happens, guess who suffers?

You and me.

Coincidentally, Alan Richman has an article on GQ.com about how a new breed of—as he terms them—"Egotarian" chefs are more interested in making food for their own enjoyment rather than the customer. I've pilfered the articles intro paragraph for my own beery needs. See if it rings true.

Something has gone wrong in our restaurant kitchens breweries lately. Suddenly, a new breed of chefs brewers seem to have decided that they should be cooking brewing beer not for your pleasure but for their own. In this competitive, male-dominated school of cooking brewing, the dishes beers that customers are served may be highly inventive and intelligent, but as Alan Richman notes, too often they are more self-indulgent than inspired. The result? Restaurants Breweries where the only person who needs to be pleased is never you, just the chef brewer.

What did I tell you? Not that far off, right?