Eli Revelle Yano Wilson. 2024. Handcrafted Careers: Working the Artisan Economy of Craft Beer. University of California Press. 264 pp. ISBN: 9780520401563.
Yingkun Hou (Southeast Missouri State University)
When I started my fieldwork for my master’s degree about ten years ago, I thought I was going to research a newly opened “microbrewery” in town. I was quickly taught the correct term, “craft brewery,” which were the small and independent companies that produce craft beer. People told me that the so-called “microbreweries” were not as “micro” as they once were. Instead, they had either become big companies themselves or had been assimilated into the big beer companies. By then, I had just quit the wine business and started grad school in anthropology in the US. Compared to the serious, formalized attitude people have in the wine world, I was struck by the “laid-back” nature of the craft beer culture. Wilson’s stories in this book brought me back to many of the scenes of those days and helped me to better understand my informants’ attitudes in the contexts of professional career trajectories in the craft beer industry.
As Wilson points out in the beginning of this book, while craft beer industry has benefited from rising in popularity, having a career in craft beer “remains a niche occupation” (x). Like the wine industry, professions in the craft beer industry are a type of “artisanal” work. However, workers (as Wilson calls them) in craft beer industry, rarely enjoy much prestige or enough pay. As someone who had also worked in craft beer in his early twenties before going to grad school for his PhD in sociology, Wilson was intrigued by the ground-level realities of what he calls “handcrafted careers.” Wilson suggests that the handcrafted careers are “the dynamic sequences of jobs that bear the distinct imprint of the workers doing the sculpting and the structural forces that constrain this process” (9). To illustrate the “complex work lives that unfold in the craft beer industry,” he joined the workers in the brewery and taproom to conduct interviews and ethnographic observations.
Each chapter opens with vignettes of scenes for working in the craft beer industry. Wilson then moves on to the topic of the chapter, laced with interesting interview excerpts with his informants to further paint a complex picture. Chapter 1 identifies three primary career pathways in craft beer: creative pathway (brewery owners, brewers, etc.), hard labor pathway (drivers, packaging workers, etc.), and service pathway (beertenders, servers, customer service, etc.). Using stories and interviews from workers, Wilson shows that white men with privileged resources tend to be set up for better access to rewarding careers along the creative pathways. In contrast, non-white men and/or men with working-class background tend to get stuck in the hard labor pathway, whereas women are stuck in the service pathway. As Wilson points out, middle class white men can take advantage of microtransactions such as “connecting with craft,” “entering the industry,” and “moving between jobs.” For example, in the stories of many middle-class white men Wilson tells, they often learned to enjoy craft beer from friends or family prior to joining the industry. Moreover, some of them can leverage their personal resources to help them “enter the industry in positions of immediate creative authority” (37). While women and people of color may not be explicitly excluded from entering the workplace outright, after a few employment microtransactions, “many find themselves diverted along subordinate career pathways that do not offer the same degree of autonomy or authority” (159).
Chapter 2 and 3 are two of my favorite chapters as they articulate something I had a vague feeling about and often wondered about but couldn’t quite identify. In Chapter 2, Wilson contextualizes “pure passion” for craft beer in the larger shift of cultural logic for work. As he points out: “Seeking passion in one’s work reflects a broader shift in how people approach their work lives in a labor landscape that is increasingly uncertain and hyperindividualized. According to this cultural logic of work, workers are encouraged to let their personal interests and personalities guide them to specific types of jobs” (48). Throughout this chapter, Wilson shows how class-privileged white men who work along the creative pathway enact this pure passion for craft beer, treating it as the “ideal relationship to employment in the industry—one modeled after their own—and value the expression of this cultural logic of work in others” (50). However, since this “beer for beer’s sake” type of pure passion is enacted through their privileged social statuses of “whiteness, upper-middle-classness, and masculinity,” or “artisanal masculinity,” workers from different backgrounds can’t fully “participate in this world of work” (50). From the perspective of Jordyn, a female brewer, her white male colleagues “play up their passion for craft brewing” in abstract terms. Indeed, as Wilson points out at the end of this chapter, this cultural logic of work reinforces the position of white men in craft beer while marginalizing others who don’t have the luxury to see and frame their relationship to work that way.
While Chapter 2 focuses on the jobs in the creative pathways, Chapter 3 focuses on the service pathways—brewery taprooms and front-of-the-house industry. In Chapter 2, we see how pure passion logic can make the opportunity of turning a hobby in craft beer to pursuing a career industry as a brewer seem like a “key employment benefit” (seen in statements like “loving the job”) (55). In Chapter 3, we read about how the line of work and play is blurred through “craft consumption.” Service staff are expected to stage a “performance of authenticity” through their “discerning knowledge of artisanal products and their ability to communicate these qualities to customers in ways that feel genuine rather than forced” (72). Wilson notes that service workers inevitably hold conflicted perceptions about their career along this pathway: while they may find these jobs appeal to their personal tastes and identities, they have a hard time seeing themselves working unstable hours and late nights indefinitely or moving up to better positions in the business. I can easily think back to how people talked about craft beer when I was conducting my research that embodied both the pure passion and the craft consumption principle. Taking it a little further to reflect on my experience working in the wine business and my research on tea shops in China, both principles help to frame the individual who engages with artisanal products as intrinsically motivated and the sales as more interpersonal than transactional.
Chapters 4 and 5 paint the picture of work lives in craft beer for minoritized workers. Chapter 4 describes in detail what the hard labor pathway looks like at the backstage of craft beer production in the areas of packaging and delivery. While these jobs are considered less desirable by industry standards, Wilson shows how some workers are able to take pride in their work and “forge positive work identities” based on the hard work they put in for their “tight-knit, craft-focused companies” (23). Chapter 5 shows how craft beer owners who are not in the default category of white male negotiate “marked professional identity” (23). For them, as the title of Chapter 5 makes clear, “It could never be just about beer” (111).
Chapter 6 focuses on people who choose to not pursue the three primary career pathways in craft beer. Wilson focuses on industrial consultants, amateur “homebrewers,” and former craft beer workers. Many of the people Wilson interviewed in this chapter still care deeply about craft beer but are too aware of the volatile and unpredictable nature of the industry. Reading this chapter reminded me of my professor who taught an Oenology classes in the second to last semester in my undergraduate program in China. He was afraid we may not land a job as a wine maker—I think among 30 of us in that program, only one I know is still making wine in France now—so he made a point to teach us something about making other fruit based alcoholic beverages. As I’ve mentioned earlier, like the brewers Wilson interviewed, many people I knew in the wine business emphasized their intrinsic passion for wine. However, I resonate with the homebrewers who reject turning their hobby into a career more; the precarity and the cultural logic of work made it very difficult for me to work in the wine field. Thus, I had to leave the profession to preserve my appreciation for wine.
This book provides thoughtful details of what lives are like working in the craft beer industry using people’s own words. Aside from sociological analysis on class, gender, and racial implications of handcrafted careers, the book can be an interesting read for anyone who is curious about what it is like to work in artisanal product industry like craft beer. It also serves as a sobering reminder of the uncertainty of career landscapes we all face in the changing new economy in general for anyone who is concerned about the direction we are heading.
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