Untapped: Exploring the Cultural Dimensions of Craft Beer

Untapped collects twelve previously unpublished essays that analyze the rise of craft beer from social and cultural perspectives.

In the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe there has been exponential growth in the number of small independent breweries over the past thirty years – a reversal of the corporate consolidation and narrowing of consumer choice that characterized much of the twentieth century. While there are legal and policy components involved in this shift, the contributors to Untapped ask broader questions. How does the growth of craft beer connect to trends like the farm-to-table movement, gentrification, the rise of the “creative class,” and changing attitudes toward both cities and farms? How do craft beers conjure history, place, and authenticity? At perhaps the most fundamental level, how does the rise of craft beer call into being new communities that may challenge or reinscribe hierarchies based on gender, class, and race?

Nathaniel G. Chapman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Arkansas Tech University. His research focuses on craft beer and the production of culture in the United States. He has also researched racial dynamics at Electronic Dance Music (EDM) festivals, and EDM more broadly. Currently, he is conducting research on gender and consumption in the craft beer industry, and the construction of authenticity in craft brewing.
 
J. Slade Lellock is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Virginia Tech. His research interests include culture, digital sociology, consumption, taste, and qualitative methodologies. His work generally focuses on the symbolic and expressive realms of culture such as music, art, film, and dress as well as social and symbolic boundaries. Given his interest in the cultural dimensions of digital social life, he has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in multiple online communities.
 
Cameron D. Lippard is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. His teaching and research interests are in social inequality, focusing on the social problems and racialization Latino immigrants face while living in the American South. Recent publications include two books: Building Inequality: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration in the Atlanta Construction Industry and Being Brown in Dixie: Race, Ethnicity, and Latino Immigration in the New South. He also has researched the connections between immigrant labor and growing industries in the American South including the construction, meatpacking, and Christmas tree industries.