Craft breweries are fermenting change, addressing local ills while serving local ales

Craft breweries advocate for a wide range of topics. We found that the most common forms of advocacy involved representing nature positively, in both imagery and text, and promoting local community issues, such as local charities.

Beer labels convey information about the beer but also about the brewer’s priorities and interests. For example, images of mountains or trees or outdoor activities might invoke environmental values in consumers. Or, a beer might be named after a particular local cause as a way to bring attention to an issue of concern.

These themes — positive representations of nature and supporting local community issues or charities — accounted for nearly half, or 44%, of the total instances of advocacy we saw.

Other advocacy priorities we saw included bids for wildlife conservation, supporting sustainability initiatives, promoting public spaces, defending LGBTQ rights and inclusion, fighting hunger or homelessness, and celebrating first responders and other front-line workers.

Nearly half of the breweries focused their advocacy activities on holding events, donating money, or sourcing the ingredients used to produce the beer locally or sustainably. So a brewery might host a water conservation workshop, or donate a portion of profits to a selected cause, or commit to using only grain grown and processed in state.

But advocacy takes many other forms for breweries, too, which is in keeping with craft brewers’ spirit of innovation and independence.

That advocacy includes operating an affiliated nonprofit organization; composting, recycling or generating renewable energy; using GMO-free or ethically sourced ingredients; or having at least one female owner.

Nearly half — 43% — of the breweries sampled were doing some sort of social advocacy, further cementing the role of craft breweries as important players in their communities. This comports with their long-standing reputation for being community-oriented entities, a characteristic acknowledged by the Brewers Association and beyond.

Nearly a third of the breweries sampled in our study engaged in environmental advocacy through representations of nature in website images, label art or beer names. Whether this level of engagement substantively reflects the values — reflected in the recreational habits, political ideologies, beliefs about quality or sourcing — of the clientele, the owners of the establishments, both or neither, is harder to discern. At the very least, it means that environmental imagery is a popular means for marketing craft beer as a local product.

Room for improvement

Very few breweries — just 1% of the sample — made direct donations of profits, despite “cause beer” as a highly visible example of brewery advocacy. The dearth of economically focused advocacy may be a reflection of the already tight margins that most of these enterprises operate under.

Also, despite gains in terms of diversity and inclusion following the release of the Brewers Association’s best practices, which include hiring more women and members of marginalized groups and fostering more inclusive spaces and policies, the pace of change has been slow.

Thus, women and other marginalized groups — including LGBTQ communities — continue to be underrepresented in the world of craft brewing, including among the brewery workforce. But there are efforts underway to change that.

So, while there is opportunity for more profound change in the industry, the evidence suggests breweries are stepping up to the plate to try to enact it.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Colleen Myles is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.