The Cult of Craft
I genuinely thought that opening my bar would give me a trump card to all the people that called me a pretentious hipster for loving craft ale. ‘Now they’ll all bow down to the outgoing, entrepreneur who dared to go against the grain.’ I mused. I had images of my lager drinking friends praising me for the renegade that I always knew I was deep down. The one who dared. The one who dreamed. The one we all look up to.
It turns out I’m actually just a pretentious hipster who started a business just to fund my own alcoholism… fair enough.
But this did lead me to ask myself a few questions about my own love of the industry and what it does to people as a whole when they get into craft beer. Some questions I’ve been asking myself about the way in which craft beer has affected my life and affected people’s perception of me and my perception of other people.
After a 10 minute conversation with a customer about the differences between West Coast and East Coast IPA’s recently, I was left pondering what kind of impression I had left on that person. Did I come over as the connoisseur that I was attempting to portray, or did I in fact look like the snob that I most likely actually am. Can I differentiate myself? I’ve been sucked into this scene and have never heard of anyone who has managed to escape back to the days of blissful, macro ignorance. I’ve been kidnapped by the craft beer community, and have been suffering with Stockholm Syndrome ever since I blagged my way through my first craft beer order in Leeds’ North Bar some years ago. Don’t get me wrong, I love the craft beer scene and the people in it. I have made some of my closest friends because of it. I would never go back to the way I was before I discovered it, but I am still no closer to knowing how I appear to people who aren’t themselves part of this close-knit group of complete strangers.
To me, craft beer is a passion, it is (as sad as it sounds) my life. It is my career, my pastime, my downtime, my reality and my way of escape. I view craft beer as a way of life, but to the uninitiated, “Chuggles” if you will (I’m sure you won’t), it is merely a hobby. To those on the outside looking in, we are no different to Ramblers or Stamp collectors, only more irritating and boring respectively. At least in writing this particular paragraph I have stumbled over the answer to at least one of my questions. I am indeed intolerably pretentious… bollocks.
Over the course of the last few years, many of my friends have come over to the dark side due to my incessant badgering. Once happy to down pints of Carling, Peroni if it’s a payday, they are now sending me pictures of their latest Scandinavian Barrel Aged Eucalyptus Sour, usually accompanied by the tagline ‘what have you done to me?!’. I was ecstatic at first, “Finally we can go to the bars that I love on our nights out!”, but did I have any right to convert them? It used to be that the only reason to avoid a bar on a night out was that someone was “bottled in there last week”. Now, “Can’t go there, they only have Punk IPA on draught” is viewed as a genuine reason for a sobering 20 minute walk to the next appropriately tattooed and moustachioed establishment. I would like to take this moment to apologise to my friends, albeit on an anonymous blog, but a heartfelt apology and ode to simple nights out nonetheless.
The Craft Beer community, as sad, pretentious and hipster as it may be, has given me far more than a hobby. I feel a sense of belonging that takes me back to my days as a Metalhead in my teens. That is essentially what it comes down to. Some people feel it in their collective support of a sports team, others feel it in their local ‘Stitch ‘n’ Bitch, it’s that longing for an adolescent clique, but one that is acceptable as an adult. Just like 14 year-old me arguing why Nu-metal isn’t ‘Proper Metal’, 27 year-old me is having the same argument about what constitutes ‘proper craft’. It’s nice to see that all that’s changed is my waistline and my taste buds. I have always been and will always be a ‘Portentous cock-end’, I will also defend my rights to be just that until my dying day.
There is but one thing that I miss and that’s the ability to drink shit beer without calling it just that.