Abstract
This book is a collection of papers first delivered at the 2009 Beeronomics Conference in Leuven, Belgium. One of the book’s aims is to ‘demonstrate that beeronomics can be a serious scientific field, with thorough economic analysis on a set of important issues for our societies’ (p. 354). This aim is met effortlessly. While six of the 18 essays are cowritten by the editor, there are also contributions by beeronomics luminaries such as Victor Tremblay and Carol Tremblay and beer historian Richard Unger.
The essays are well arranged into four thematic sections discussing, first, beer history, then consumption, industrial organization and, lastly, the new beer markets. Admittedly the ‘important issues for our societies’ may not always emerge so clearly to the sociologist. But beer history in particular is a fascinating field and one full of ironic findings. The development of the microbrewery movement which currently affects the Western beer markets substantially holds several in store. Since the early Middle Ages monks had the exclusive right to brew beer, and beers were local or regional at best. After the Reformation, however, beer was brewed by independent brewers who annually increased their output and merged with other brewers, which by and by led to a consolidation of the market through ‘shake-outs’ of small brewers and mergers into large economies-of-scale industrial operations. Now some of the large macrobrewers are again producing microbrews today, among them also monks’ beers (Persyn, Swinnen and Vanormelingen).
Nostalgia is not the origin of the microbrewery movement. Microbrews, or craft beers, are of higher quality than the standard lager beers, and as incomes rise the craft market share therefore increases (Tremblay and Tremblay). Despite the higher production costs, craft beers appeal to industrial macrobrewers because they help ‘winning’ new customers’ hearts by appealing to feelings of regional belonging or local pride in the different countries they operate in (see especially Adams’ essay). Macrobrewers, ironically (again), thus play an important role not only in the global beer market internationally, but also in the microbrewery movement which had originally developed as a niche market in opposition to low-quality mass beer. That Tremblay and Tremblay highlight this fact is a genuine contribution, which helps to forgive the authors for a few superfluous diagrams and tables.
Beer, it becomes clear throughout the entire volume, is an important source of revenue, so much so, in fact, that alcohol bans cannot be enforced in regions in which drinking alcohol is widely frowned upon because the loss of tax revenue cannot be recuperated. Arora et al. discuss this problematic revolving around the ‘beer-industrial-taxation complex’ in the Indian beer market but it also emerges in other essays. A second pervasive theme is that, within beeronomics, the American beer market (dominated by macrobrewers Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors who together account for 79.0 % of the market’s [p. 197] small but buoyant craft segment) is posited as the ‘standard’ against which all other national markets are measured. This presents us with a lopsided assessment of beer markets elsewhere. Thus the spectacular failures of macrobrewers to gain a foothold in the Chinese market are seriously puzzling (‘why did the tried-and-tested methods not work?’), as are the drinking preferences of young Chinese who choose cheap Chinese beers of undifferentiated tastes over well-developed, rich, Western-style beers. Bai et al. conclude that ‘foreign firms, with their expertise honed in other markets, just do not “get” the China beer market’ (p. 284). The German beer market apparently also poses more questions than the dominant view can answer. Wonderfully discussed in William J. Adams’ essay, this market, with its many regional craft beer brands, seems strangely unorganized and illogical in the sense that ‘some German breweries might be managed with objectives other than profitability in mind’ (p. 238). With profitability in mind, soft factors such as adherence to brewing tradition on the side of brewers and attachment to ‘my local beer’, even though it costs more than the national/ international brand, cannot be accounted for.
As the breadth of the essays collected in this volume evinces, the American way is not the way of all beer. Beeronomics is a young discipline, and one would hope that future work in it will be dedicated to other ‘bog-standard’ beer drinking countries like Australia and New Zealand which have received no mention this time. Beer is a vital ingredient of everyday culture in these markets – and culture matters to beer-economists, as is demonstrated throughout the volume (see especially McCluskey and Shreay). Discussions of drinking practices, drinking venues and consumption-inducing events were also missing in the contributions but should, as the field matures, be taken on board.