

Class

If we hearken back to the early decades of "microbrewing," we can paint a mostly-accurate portrait of the early founders: plucky but woefully underfunded dreamers who built their businesses on sweat-equity. There were outliers--Jim Koch, a Harvard MBA who blew off building a brewery in favor of contract brewing and a slick marketing approach--but for the most part, it's accurate. This was a big part of the mystique of the "little guys" who challenged big beer, and one promoted and burnished for decades.

And while it's true as far as it goes, there's another age-old truth that it conceals: the gulf between brewery owners and workers. Most of the people toiling in beer--pulling pints, delivering kegs, hauling grain sacks--are working-class. Owners are sometimes, too, but they're also the kinds of people with access to family funds or with the background and collateral to secure sizable loans. As companies grow and prosper, that gulf widens; the folks doing the pulling and hauling may get a bump in pay, the real rewards accrue to the shareholders. There's a we're-all-in-it-together ethos that pervades craft beer, but the "it" looks a lot different depending on where your office is located.

This tension infused the way Shirah spoke throughout the interview with Ray.

"We both came from trailer parks, one in Oklahoma, one in North Carolina.... We figured out we’d both been in handcuffs enough times to where we understood what the real-world was like. We weren’t spoon-fed Buckhead boys."

Buckhead refers to a wealthy enclave in Atlanta, one of the wealthiest ZIP codes in the US. Shirah's point is clear. But it relates to a more subtle element within craft brewing that has really begun to open up in the past decade. For most of its existence, craft brewing was a relatively small-bore undertaking. It didn't attract serious money. That has changed, exacerbated by corporate buyouts. Where breweries were once undervalued relative to their investment potential, speculation has created absurd valuations and attracted obscene amounts of money. And that means that at the market level, it can feel like the pattern of trailer park and Buckhead is repeating itself.

"I feel a responsibility, similar to the way I spoke out, to let people understand the struggles of the small guy. Why not talk openly about the struggles of a small craft brewery? I don’t consider us to be a big brewery. I still sweep floors and clean toilets... A lot of the growth is coming from the guys that have been purchased by the disruptive growth funds, and it’s because they have resources that the small guys don’t have. And that needs to be exposed to a certain degree. I’m happy to talk about those things."

There has always been a disparity between well-funded and DIY start-up breweries. But now that millions of dollars slosh around the industry, it has become exaggerated, making it harder and harder for bootstrap operations to create visibility against well-funded competitors. Scofflaw's business was built in part on this dichotomy, but they are far from the first to feel its presence.



Culture

Class isn't the only thing Shirah broadcast in his comments--they contained a strong cultural valence as well. It is the same dynamic that has paralyzed the country for the past two years--the one we see when we turn on a football game or listen to news about the latest confederate monument. I heard it when Shirah started a thought this way: