A couple of months ago I felt that it was time I reviewed a book again for a sociological journal. Looking through the list of what was available I quickly decided that I would review two books associated with the topic of alcohol so as to become more acquainted with the ins and outs of that subject (I work at an Institute for Addiction Issues at my university but often feel like I know nothing about the stuff. ) (No jokes about first-hand experience with alcoholism through living in Scotland please. I get that all the time.) The books of choice were The Economics of Beer, edited by Johan F.M. Swinnen, and Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class by Owen Jones. I didn’t get Jones as that book was snatched up pretty much straight away all over the work for reviews. I did get the beer book, however, and I don’t regret it.
The Economics of Beer 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). In other words, academics working in this field aren’t too sure that all the fun they’re having with beer isn’t somehow in the way of serious scholarship. So what did they do? They did serious quantitative research, collected hard facts that can be presented in tables and graphs, and they founded The Beeronomics Society, all of which helps to show that beeronomics is in fact a scientific discipline. This aim, it has to be said, is met effortlessly by the 18 essays in this volume.
The essays are well-arranged into four thematic sections discussing, firstly, beer history, then consumption, industrial organisation and lastly the new beer markets. Admittedly, the ‘important issues for our societies’ may not always emerge so clearly to the sociologist. Perhaps what is important for society from the point of view of an economist is quite different from what would generally be considered important. In any case, beer history for one is a very fascinating field as I discovered. Quite unintentionally methinks it is even full of irony! Consider this, for example: 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 (skipping a few hundred years here) 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 like Anheuser-Busch or SABMiller are again producing microbrews today, among them also monks’ beers (Persyn, Swinnen and Vanormelingen in this book). Full circle!
Alas, nostalgia which can often to be held accountable for cultural shifts these days is not the the prime cause of the microbrewery movement. Microbrews, or craft beers, are of higher quality than the standard lager beers (Go microbrews!), and as incomes rise the craft market share therefore increases (Tremblay & Tremblay in this volume). Despite the higher production costs and all sorts of other complications, craft beers still appeal to industrial macrobrewers because they target a different market segment. They help ‘winning’ young, health-conscious, quality-oriented, reflective and erudite customers’ hearts by appealing to feelings of personal superiority and regional belonging (see esp. Adams’ essay). Regional belonging comes in because microbrews, being bottled and all, can’t be transported very far unless one wants to incur astronomical costs for ferrying bottles of beer around which brewers normally try to avoid (hence bottling plants across the US – all the same cheap low-quality beer but bottled on location). Microbrews are therefore always local, unlike Becks which is owned by international beermulti AB InBev and can be purchased around the globe. But AB InBev is also producing regional beers these days. Macrobrewers, ironically, 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 & Tremblay highlight this fact in their essay 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 (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. Young Chinese, if they drink beer at all, like drinking copious amounts, so the beer needs to be of low alcohol content and it needs to be cheap, too. Once you understand the drinking culture you know how to enter the market, one would think. But this is not what foreign investors did when they tried to build up breweries in China; Bai et al. conclude that “foreign firms, with their expertise honed in other markets, just do not ‘get’ the China beer market” (p. 284).True story.
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 unorganised and illogical in the sense that “some German breweries might be managed with objectives other than profitability in minds” (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. I have to make a confession: When I read this essay, I was a little bit proud to be German! We have so many different beers and it is true, I for one like to buy local beers! From the region where I was born though – I don’t like the Berlin beers. I love 
Lausitzer Porter! (A high-caloric and -alcoholic beer though, so gotta be careful with that one.) The poor American beer brewers seemed so jaded with all their preoccupation with profit. Do they still enjoy drinking beer?
As the breadth of the essays collected in this volume evinces, the American way is not the way of all beer. Thank God! 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. A beer book that doesn’t mention Speights in its chapter on beer consumption and advertising? That seemed strange to me. The Speights commercials must have been some of the most successful beer commercials ever. Here is an example of what I mean:
Beer is a vital ingredient of everyday culture in these markets – and culture matters to beer-economists, as is demonstrated throughout the volume (see esp. McCluskey & 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.
I have learned so much about beer in reading these ssays! Half-knowledge most of the time, admittedly, like: Two days ago I went out for drinks with a friend and I asked for a bottled beer (to take outside with me later on – spring is here and it’s warm again!). When the waitress said ‘we have Becks and Heineken, which one will it be?’ I quickly tried to remember which macrobrewer owns which beer – because I wanted to go with the smaller one. In the end I made the wrong choice: I chose Becks which is owned by the biggest macrobrewer AB InBev but I should have taken Heineken, which ranks third in global beer production. (As I am not a beer specialist I can’t appreciate the difference between these two pale lagers anyway.)
