The Hidden Strains of ‘Cool’ Jobs

Hidden Sources of Employment Strain

Existing literature helps us understand how ‘cool’ jobs can also represent economically precarious employment, and that workers endure the lackluster dimensions of their jobs in order to maintain access to other appealing job characteristics. However, this framework neglects two important aspects of how workers engage their everyday employment. First, it overlooks potential sources of employment strain for workers that go beyond formal job conditions to involve social, psychological, or emotional challenges. Second, previous scholarship implicitly assumes that a job’s ‘cool’ features are distinct from its precarious ones, and that workers put up with the latter in order to continue to access the former. Yet this neglects the prospect that both dimensions of a job may be embedded in the same job feature(s). In this scenario, workers would struggle to separate what they love about their jobs from what causes them hardship because the two are inextricably linked.

We make interventions in the literature on both these points by drawing on ground-level insights about the everyday experiences of craft brewery workers. We detail how the employment strains workers in this study face extend to their mental health, their social reputation within the industry, and their sense of work identity. As a result, we capture how ‘cool’ aspects of work in this industry can end up exacerbating the employment strains that workers experience, growing more pronounced over time.

Brewery Workers in North Carolina

Ethnographic research by the first author included five years (2016–2021) of participant observation working in craft breweries in North Carolina. During the majority of this time, the first author was employed as a Craft Brewer working a full-time schedule. His field notes, compiled on a daily basis during this period, include hundreds of hours of informal conversations with brewery owners, Brewers, and other brewery employees. The first author also conducted approximately 50 in-depth interviews, selected non-randomly and roughly one-hour in length, with brewery workers identified through industry contacts. Most interviewees were employed in the ‘back of the house’ of breweries, in roles such as Head Brewer and Assistant Brewer. The semi-structured questions posed to workers covered a variety of topics, including: what was their motivation for entering the industry? Why did craft brewing appeal to them? What kinds of skills and other forms of knowledge were necessary to survive and thrive in the industry?

Brewery Workers in New Mexico and California

Research for this study by the second author spanned three years (2019–2021). ³ During this time, the second author conducted a total of 107 in-depth interviews with industry workers in a wide range of positions, including: brewery owners, Brewers, taproom ‘Beertenders’, Delivery Drivers, and Canning Line Operators. As with the first author, interview topics covered a variety of subjects related to the workers’ job history, workplace experiences, and general impressions about employment in this industry. Interviews lasted between 45 and 90 minutes and were subsequently transcribed and coded using Atlas.ti (version 8.4.5) qualitative software. The second author also engaged in ethnographic data collection in craft breweries, which consisted mainly of observing and shadowing workers in situ and engaging in ‘ride-alongs’ (Kusenbach, 2003) in order to get a feel for daily work rhythms and workplace interactions.

Positionality and Data Access

Both authors were able to leverage their ‘outsider within’ status in the craft beer industry as a source of strategic positionality (Reyes, 2020). Doing so allowed them to develop rapport with brewery workers and generally access richer qualitative data. The authors’ respective statuses relative to other workers in this industry involved both industry professional dimensions and social dimensions. Professionally, because the first author was employed as a Craft Brewer throughout much of this study, he was generally perceived by study respondents to be intelligible of industry terminology, skills, and labor experiences. Similarly, the second author had prior industry experience as a brewery Sales Representative as well as other industry credentials, which aided in his ability to engage in ‘industry talk’ with an air of legitimacy, especially with customer-focused brewery employees.

Both authors also represented a social fit with the dominant group of workers in this industry who are educated, White, cis-presenting men in their 20s and 30s (Withers, 2017). When entering the field, both authors took steps to accentuate their aesthetic characteristics associated with the above characteristics in a way they understood to be normative for this industry. For example, the first author maintained a beard during fieldwork and donned industry-typical clothing, such as plaid shirts, t-shirts, jeans, and baseball caps; the second author would wear brewery-logo’d shirts and jeans when meeting with interviewees. Approximating industry insiders represented a unique advantage of our specific ethnographic toolkit (Reyes, 2020), aiding in our ability to converse with workers about difficult subjects pertinent to this research, such as alcoholism, workplace pressure, and the rigors of their jobs. We recognize that our positionality also limited our access to data in other ways, such as by potentially constraining our data on study themes from under-represented groups, such as women and people of color. While we have attempted to report our findings in a way that is sensitized to the social location of workers, especially with respect to race and gender, documenting the intersectional experiences of workers from marginalized social groups was not our primary focus here and thus merits additional research. ⁴

Material Strain – Growing Disenchanted with ‘Cool’ Work Conditions

Many workers felt their perspective on the industry had shifted over the years. When asked what initially attracted them to craft brewing, early-career employees emphasized the distinct ‘perks’ of jobs in craft beer, such as the prospect of working for small companies with an informal work environment, or access to flexible schedules and free products. For some, entering the craft beer industry meant leaving behind jobs that did not offer these kinds of perks (even though they might offer higher wages and formal benefits). However, for veteran craft brewery workers, what they once saw as ‘cool’ features of their jobs elicited a mixed or outright negative response. This was evident in an exchange posted to a popular social media site between Mike, a Head Brewer with seven years of experience, and Sandy, a Brewer and Salesperson who recently left the industry after a similar tenure: ⁵

Mike: Five or so years ago, you could throw a rock and hit 20 people who wanted to work in the brewing industry, be it Brewers, Cellar, or whatever. These days, not so much . . .

Sandy: Sadly it’s because most breweries don’t pay wages people can actually live off and enjoy life. It’s hard, hot dirty work – be it brewing, pouring, or sales and there are a lot of other ways to feed your family and not take a beating physically and mentally. I think it’s especially true for what us women deal with ‘out there’ . . . Putting 70k miles a year on my personal vehicle, never being home, physically beating myself up, dealing with the assholes in accounts and in the industry who think it’s ok to speak to women the way they do . . . for the money I was making was insane. The job ‘perks’ (free beer, swag, etc.) doesn’t equalize the deficit in pay.

While some workers such as Mike continue to perceive the inherent appeal of working in craft breweries, other workers have adopted a critical stance toward what these jobs really represent when seen from all angles. For those in the latter group, working for a small company with access to job ‘perks’ continued to hold some appeal but it also meant accepting lower pay and shouldering business burdens using personal resources.

Many workers described how the informal organization of work in their breweries was a double-edged sword. While these individuals were initially drawn to working in an informal atmosphere where their job duties could change or expand on a weekly basis, they later found that this arrangement caused them stress. For example, one Brewer said that after several months on the job he was tasked with managing inventory, educating staff, and representing the brewery at events – all in addition to brewing beer. Taproom Beertenders, meanwhile, described being asked to repair broken chairs or help clean kegs between serving customers, neither of which were in their job description. As Frenette and Ocejo (2018) note, wearing many hats at work can be stimulating for workers, enabling them to ‘re-enchant’ their jobs anew. Yet several industry veterans also saw inconsistent working conditions – where employees were expected to move between roles and constantly stay busy in order to maximize efficiency – as a primary source of their frustration with their jobs over time. As one Brewer put it, being a part of a ‘skeleton crew’ and feeling like the job was never finished was the norm at his company. It was also an aspect of his job from which he derived a complicated mixture of pride (in self-efficacy) and exhaustion (from work overload).

The realization that day-to-day employment in craft breweries was hard and unrewarding work also took a toll on workers. Daniel, an Assistant Brewer in his mid-30s who started his job less than a year ago, described routine brewing jobs this way: ‘I got into brewing because I was sick of sitting over a desk all day. [Yet] brewing is the worst aspects of a service job and a production job put together: entitled customers and back-breaking work.’ Like Daniel, some brewery owners also said they have experienced burnout over their tenure in the industry despite occupying positions of creative and entrepreneurial authority. For instance, when the first author asked Tony, a nine-year industry veteran, why he decided to start a brewery, Tony replied: ‘It seemed fun at the time. But I don’t know anymore.’ Tony explained the long hours, friction with his co-owner, and the constant anxiety that came with changing customer demands have been a ceaseless challenge for his business and for himself personally. While Tony claimed that he still ‘loves’ the industry, he also pointed out that he has not taken a vacation since his brewery opened four years ago.

Other brewery owners were more pointed in their criticism of working in the industry because of the unforeseen challenges they have encountered while trying to turn their ‘passion’ into a viable business. When asked what advice he would give to someone looking to start a brewery, Sam, the co-owner of an established brewery and a board member of his state’s brewing guild, offered a succinct reply: ‘Don’t.’ Adding that he was ‘actively looking for another career’, Sam produced a laundry list of behind-the-scenes troubles he has faced running a small company he once thought was ‘cool’: friction with local government regulators, rising material prices, equipment malfunctions, predatory distributor contracts, labor shortages, and a capricious customer base.

However ‘cool’ their craft brewery jobs may have seemed at the outset of their employment, the compounded and double-edged material challenges workers such as Sam, Tony, and Sandy have encountered have changed their perspective on their jobs over time. Each has had to re-examine some of the same job conditions that drew them to this work in the first place. As a veteran brewery taproom manager put it: ‘It feels like death by a thousand tiny bites.’

Social Strain – Struggling to Manage Workplace Norms

Many workers in this study mentioned that their jobs involved constant engagement with their industry’s central product – beer – which they made, sold, discussed, and consumed on and off the clock. The upsides of this arrangement were straightforward: constantly engaging with craft products they ‘love’ led some workers to describe their jobs as highly immersive and enjoyably social (Thurnell-Read, 2014), while others said this enabled them to operate in a ‘flow’-like state that made the workday go by quickly (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; see Siciliano, 2016). However, the drawbacks of this constant engagement with craft beer, which involved dealing with social pressure and potentially problematic norms of behavior, were less clear to workers early in their industry tenures.

Ryan, a Brewer in his mid-30s who entered the industry following a stint as a pizza chain manager, embodied these challenges. Ryan liked being a Craft Brewer but had grown to hate ‘craft beer culture’ and the social pressures that came to define it for him. ‘I think I was kind of like everyone when I first started, thinking: I get to make beer and drink beer while doing it? That’s sick!’ he said. As the only brewhouse employee, Ryan had considerable autonomy, little oversight, and access to a near-limitless supply of beer straight from the source. ‘It must be great to hang out and drink all day’, his friends frequently remarked. For a while, this was not far from reality for Ryan, who recalled:

I’d start mornings with a beer right off the [fermentation] tank. I’d day drink. Then I hung out after work for a couple of beers with the other managers almost every day. I’d stay later, too, to drink with the bartenders. I was obliterated most nights and hung over the next morning. Then I’d drink a bit to take the edge off, and around we’d go again.

Ryan knew his alcoholism, fueled by his job, had become a problem when he started tripping over hoses in the brewhouse and hitting his head on fermentation tank doors. He forgot things, misplacing tools or losing track of a recipe.

Ryan attempted to cut back on his beer consumption, but his self-imposed intervention came at a social cost because it violated strong industry norms and peer expectations. All of Ryan’s industry peers drank constantly and expected the same of others. ‘I honestly don’t feel like I experienced peer pressure until I became a brewer’, Ryan said. ‘Every time I go out for dinner or to someone’s brewery or they come here, if I don’t drink or I only have one beer, it’s like, “What’s wrong? Don’t you like beer anymore? You need to relax, man.”’ ⁶

With his reputation as a Brewer at stake, Ryan said he felt the burdens of industry peer pressure manifest in other ways. He recalled how early in his career he had worn business casual attire, including a blazer, to a local brewery event. The other Brewers, dressed in plaid shirts and trucker hats, mocked him the entire evening. Years later, conference and festival attendees would still ask him where his ‘suit’ was, which caused Ryan to avoid these industry events despite their importance for professional development. Ryan’s experience underscores the social pressure workers said they faced from industry colleagues to constantly engage with and consume the products made by their companies.

Other workers suggested the incentive to (over)consume the products they produced was built into the job itself. One of the most common ‘perks’ listed on brewery job postings for any level position is free or heavily discounted access to products and company swag. Several workers explained that a supply of free beer was sometimes one of the only consistent job benefits the brewery offered them. Two veteran Brewers recalled being exclusively ‘paid in beer’ early in their careers while interning or volunteering at a brewery: they would walk out of the workplace after a 10-hour shift with only a six-pack or growler (32 or 64-ounce glass vessel) to show for their efforts. To workers such as Ryan, free product still represented a significant portion of how he conceptualized his earnings: ‘When I started, I was getting paid 30k a year full-time. But at least I had free beer’, he said. Other workers rationalized their regular consumption of free products as a way of realizing the value of their labor, a perspective they said many of their brewery colleagues also shared and sometimes encouraged newer workers to adopt. As one Assistant Brewer explained, ‘You may be paid $15/hour as an Assistant Brewer, but if you drink three pints at $7 each during or after your shift, you’ve effectively raised your hourly rate to over $17. If you don’t drink, you lose that.’ The pressure to realize one’s labor value through beer was even more pronounced in breweries that controlled employee beer consumption through weekly or monthly ‘beer rations’ or daily ‘shift beers’. For example, a brewhouse worker explained that because he regularly took product home that was considered defective or expired, he needed to buy a second refrigerator to store it all. Yet when the first author asked why he did not refrain from taking more beer, the worker scoffed. ‘It’s use it or lose it, man. I’m not going to say no to free beer’, he said. For such workers, reducing one’s intake of free beer was akin to voluntarily reducing one’s employment benefits.

Social consumption of craft beer was also the primary way for workers to network, build relationships with their colleagues, and establish themselves within the local craft beer scene. Workers noted that participating in industry conversations almost always involved consuming beer and implicitly sanctioning non-drinkers, as Ryan described above. Paralleling Christensen’s (2015) observations of Japanese corporate culture, drinking makes brewers, particularly those who are men, intelligible to each other; to turn down a beer is to reject the professional and social capital contained in that pint. While some workers devised personalized strategies to regulate their consumption of the principal product their company makes – such as limiting themselves to one beer per shift or not keeping any alcohol in their homes – doing so put them at odds with industry norms. It could strain their relationship with industry peers in which the constant consumption of industry products was a normalized activity, a sign of the industry’s ‘coolness’, and a way of relating to one another.

Work Identity Strain – Falling Out with a ‘Cool’ Career

Many craft brewery workers said they were initially drawn to their jobs because they represented avenues for creative expression and identity that other jobs lacked. However, their idealized image of the bohemian artist or mad scientist dreaming up new creations was often short-lived once they were employed full-time in the industry and forced to reconcile these aspirations with the reality of routine employment within small companies with tight margins. This was the case for James, who was the Head Brewer of a small brewery for three years. ‘When I first started, I really liked this job’, explained James.

I was really fired up. It was a brand-new brewery, everything was experimental. I’d wake up with an idea for a new beer, stay up late researching malts and hops, brew it by the end of the week. We’d throw it up on the wall when it was ready and see what happened. It was a blank slate, and it was wild when something clicked with the locals.

But after only one year, James found his relationship with craft brewing changing because of the structural constraints he faced at work:

The problem is that we only have 10 taps. We can only have 10 beers on at a time. Six of those taps are flagships, always on. Then you have the seasonal beers, sometimes two, three. Most of those have a following now so that people expect them. That leaves one or two taps to play with. I got into this because I loved the research and the art. I loved creating new things. I loved seeing customers respond to my creations. Now I dread it every time an experimental beer becomes popular because it means I’m going to be stuck brewing that beer over and over again. [And] what if I replace a strong seller with a beer no one likes? Sales could slump and then the owners would be pissed too. It would all be my fault. I know it sucks, but I’d rather play it safe. Things are stressful enough as it is. I used to brew like 50 new beers a year. Now I just brew the same stuff over and over again. It’s like a production job now. I’ve lost my fire. I don’t even tell people I’m a Brewer anymore.

Workers like James described burning out at a job they had long idealized. The more their creativity was constrained due to the needs of the business, the more their passion for being in this industry dwindled. ⁷ Liam, a music major-turned-Assistant-Brewer with one year of employment under his belt, explained:

I thought making beer would be like composing music. What I realized is that brewing isn’t art. It can be, maybe, but I don’t get to make the recipes or anything. I just brew what they tell me. It’s just another production job.

In effect, what some workers initially conceptualized as a ‘cool’ identity and ‘artisanal’ career ended up being a series of physically strenuous and monotonous tasks.

For workers such as James and Liam, brewing craft beer was not intended to be merely an occupation, it was an aspirational identity that spoke to their projected futures and sense of identity (see Ayala-Hurtado, 2022; Duffy, 2017; Sennett, 2008). Beyond any perk or paycheck, a primary reason these individuals entered the industry was an internalized sense of satisfaction with who they could become through their work. Instead, these workers described facing an internal conflict as they attempted to reconcile creative ambitions and identities with the mundane realities of craft beer production. As case in point, workers frequently talked about their first few weeks on the job in ways that stressed their own naivete: one worker called this his ‘honeymoon period’ with craft beer, while another explained, ‘initially, I was infatuated with the job’. The everyday realities of working in craft beer contradicted their aspirational work identities of being neo-artisans surrounded by products they were passionate about. James put this bluntly:

It’s like a bad breakup. One morning you wake up and realize things have been bad for a while. You got comfortable; you lost your edge. You don’t really like yourself anymore. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just time to go.