If you want to understand hyperreality, you should probably start with tiki.
Tiki culture was born in the United States in the early half of the 20th century, thousands of miles from its Polynesian inspiration. From the beginning, it was a fantasy of escapism, with its palm trees and bamboo huts; its beach motifs and floral prints; and its rum-heavy, lethal cocktails.
Although tiki’s origins can be mapped back to the Pre-Prohibition era, it came into full force in the wake of the Second World War, when U.S. soldiers formerly stationed in the South Pacific returned to home soil, bringing with them a nostalgia for far-off climes.
“Tiki culture emerged, which were these very tacky bars, made out of straw and tiki torches,” explains Irish artist, author, and podcaster Blindboy Boatclub in an early episode of The Blindboy Podcast. The fashion that emerged was one of appropriation and caricature: whole chunks of Polynesian art and culture were lifted straight from their island homes, and dropped, as cheaply made copies, directly into bars across America. To U.S. drinkers, interacting with tiki had everything to do with the idea of vacation, and nothing to do with a real cultural engagement with the people of the region.
“The drinks genre itself is rooted in colonialism and imperialism,” says Samoan-Mexican bartender Samuel Jimenez in Punch. “To me, there’s no way around it. To me, non-appropriative tiki doesn’t exist. It’s not a thing. It can’t be a thing.”
Today, modern tiki culture could be described as a copy of a copy, high kitsch based on white post-war memory, positioned at multiple removes from its original inspiration.
“What was so weird about tiki culture was that they tried to recreate Polynesian culture not based on facts or research or sensitivity, but by the colonial memory,” says Boatclub. “It became hyperreal; a hyperreal simulacrum.”
“Hyperreality” might sound too stuffy and academic to have any bearing on contemporary drinks culture. But it isn’t just relevant—it’s everywhere. From Mai Tais in ceramic mugs to craft beer’s darling, the New England IPA, the theory can be used to understand the way we consume, and the way that craft beer has grown and developed since its inception.
But before we chart the role that hyperreality plays in the beer world, we must first look at hyperreality’s parent philosophy: postmodernism.
“In the most basic sense, postmodernism is a late 20th-century response to mid-century modernism, which was itself a response to classicism and traditionalism,” explains Dr. J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, former professor of Communication Studies at Randolph College, principal of non-profit Crafted For All, and executive director of non-profit Craft x EDU. “It becomes hard to define postmodernism because it manifests in so many different places—in academic thought, in art, in literature, etc.”
Broadly, postmodernism is characterized by skepticism toward reason. It’s seen as a reaction to the thoughts and values of modernism, which was a late-19th-century and early-20th-century philosophical, intellectual, and artistic movement.
“If modernism was an attempt to create some order in a Western world that was ravaged by the horrors of modern warfare, technologically enhanced genocide, and the global spread of fascism in post-slavery ‘modernity,’” Jackson-Beckham continues, “postmodernism is the realization that modernism resulted in the creation and elevation of grand narratives that were, in some sense, failures; a re-entrenchment of the power of ‘great white men’; a bizarre hierarchy of cultural meaning that was absolutely no match for the rise of mass media.”
Postmodernism manifests differently in different fields, but broadly, it’s a school of thought that wields irony, distrust, and even anarchy against the authoritative “truths” of modernism.
And that’s where Lucky Charms IPA comes in.
“If you look at the development of beer [throughout] history as a canonical body of information, then there is actually forward progress because it's a technological discipline,” says Canada-based beer writer Jordan St. John. “Take the progressively lighter styles of German Lager throughout the 19th century, largely inspired by Pilsner Urquell. Pasteur does some great work at Carlsberg with pH and yeast culturing and pasteurization and that is seen as the way forward. Refrigeration, developed by Spaten, is in use a year later in North America. Modernity can be seen as the march of history.”
During the early 20th century—and following U.S. Prohibition—modernism gave rise to industrial-scale, mass-produced beer. Progress seemed to march infinitely upwards, led by technological developments that could produce ever more perfect beer. But what happens when that march of history runs out of road?
“The problem is that eventually you've pushed that as far as it can go,” explains St. John. “If you look at Lager in England, like Carling Black Label, or in America, like Miller Lite, modernity has eventually created its logical conclusion. Light beer uses all of the technological progress derived in order to create a product that's as technologically perfect as it can possibly be. It's just that it turns out that drive for order is a systemic goal whereas enjoyment is not beholden to technological progress.”
Just as postmodernism was an insurgence against the certainty and order of modernism, craft beer was seen as a revolt against the ubiquity and one-dimensionality of Big Beer. Modernism might have yielded beers that were technically flawless and perfectly consistent, but it also led to a hegemony of Light Lager. Eventually, drinkers wanted variation, and novelty, and surprise.
In this context, craft beer looks postmodern enough: its rejection of the saminess of Light Lager in favor of more innovative and creative brewing mirrors postmodernism’s revolt against modernism’s certainty and truth. But it might be more complicated than that.
“I [do] think that craft beer was born within and has long relied upon very modernist sensibilities. I mean, in the U.S., our origin stories are a whole bunch of great white men stories,” says Jackson-Beckham. “Also, the sort of obsession with ‘authenticity’ and ‘purity’ of craft is very high modern. Still, I think there are a lot of things going on in craft beer that do fall in line with postmodernism—the spirit of play and irony, the disregard for the rigidity of established hierarchies when it comes to style and ingredient use, pastiche and collage, camp. I mean, I am not drinking it, but Lucky Charms IPA is about as postmodern as it gets.”
One notable example of postmodernism in craft beer is Scottish craft pioneer BrewDog’s Punk IPA. “Punk” is the brewery’s flagship beer, and is the biggest-selling craft beer in the U.K. The name reflects BrewDog’s originally anarchic strategy (though whether or not it remains, or in fact ever was, “punk” has been hotly contested for years), and the brewery’s marketing copy even describes the beer as a “post modern classic.”
“In their original incarnation, I’d be inclined to agree that [BrewDog] could be considered within the postmodern—if we think of postmodernism as implying the incredulity to metanarratives, effacement of key boundaries or genres, and a general sense of absurdity and provocation, then they definitely fit the bill,” explains Dr. Sam Goodman, Principal Academic in English & Communication at Bournemouth University. “BrewDog always seemed happy to smash things up in the sense of postmodern ‘creative violence’ and destabilization.”
“However, over time—like modernism and postmodernism—[BrewDog has] gradually been canonized, and the only postmodern aspect I think they have left is a sense of irony, which only really leads to depthlessness,” he continues. “Whereas they might have begun with a sense of parody, now they are essentially a pastiche of their own original intentions.” Just as nothing says “punk” more than asking your loyal investors for unpaid labor, nothing quite says classically postmodern like becoming a pastiche of yourself.
The concept of hyperreality—and within that, simulation and simulacra—was pioneered by 20th-century French philosopher and social theorist Jean Baudrillard, who was also a “major guru” of French postmodern theory. A complex theory, hyperreality “involves taking a reality, creating a simulated version of that reality, and then substituting that simulation for the real thing as a kind of hyperreal version of the original which people buy into,” says St. John.
As an example, look to contemporary postmodern painting, where hyperreal artworks—such as works by Richard Estes or Kit King—seek to resemble high-resolution photographs, to the point where they appear to be photographs, thus replacing the “original.” The viewer, if the painter has achieved their goal, cannot see the tell-tale brushstrokes, and thus assumes the artwork to be a photograph.
“In my work on this, I’ve always understood Baudrillard’s simulacra and simulation as boiling down to the notion of the copy without an original, as developed across his four stages of representation,” says Goodman. “It’s obviously a bit more complicated than that, but it’s his way of fathoming how, in technological postmodernity, representations become indistinguishable from the real as a result of a pervasive and internalized media and consumer culture. There’s a school of thought that argues this distinction between real and hyperreal has become meaningless in the digital age, where the so-called ‘unreal’ of digital existence is as real to us as the real world, or replaces it nearly entirely. But in a casual, working sense of his theory, it’s this idea that we imbue representations with the qualities of the real, and thus they have meaningful effects.”
Baudrillard’s four stages of representation, outlined in his 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation, are as follows: that which is “the reflection of a profound reality,” a true or faithful image or copy; that which “masks and denatures a profound reality,” or a perversion of reality; that which “masks the absence of a profound reality,” or the pretense of reality; and that which “has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.” A simulacrum is, for the sake of clarity, a still image or copy, whereas a simulation is an active process: the simulacrum is the painting, the simulation is the machine.
To look back at the analogy of painting, a first-stage representation would be realism, a simple depiction of what the painter saw before them. A second-stage representation would be impressionism, replete with exaggerated features and obvious distortion. A third would be representational surrealism, depicting a warped and imagined reality, but presented to the viewer as reality. And for a fourth-stage representation, the simulacrum, think of an abstract expressionist painting by Mark Rothko, or, interestingly, hyperrealistic portraiture, like Estes’.
Baudrillard then defines the three orders of simulacra, each of which is aligned with a historical period: “First order, associated with the premodern period, where representation is clearly an artificial placemarker for the real item,” writes Laureen Andalib in her blog L’Art D’Être. “Second order, associated with the modernity of the Industrial Revolution, where distinctions between representation and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities. Third order, associated with the postmodernity of Late Capitalism, where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulacrum, and originality becomes a totally meaningless concept.” To use Baudrillard’s famous example of Disneyland, this third order is one in which Mickey Mouse is presented as totally real—but, of course, there is no such thing as a real Mickey Mouse. Mickey has always been a simulation.
This last stage, the realm of Late Capitalist simulacra, is surprisingly familiar. Simulacra exist all around: Tiki cocktails; Irish pubs; brands such as Hollister and Ted Baker; soap operas; New England IPA.
But if what we assume to be real is actually hyperreal, then what is real? What is reality? And what does that mean for beer?
“Let's say you have a product. We'll call it Goose Island IPA,” says St. John. “It came to Ontario, where I live, sometime around 2013 or 2014. It was quite good, and it was brewed in Chicago. Now, that brewery can't support the volume needed for the province, so they need to make a local version. The locally produced version is a simulation of the Chicago version. It is inspired by it, designed after it, and while the brewers would tell you it passed their taste panel, it's more or less a simulation of the original product. Eventually, you phase out the Chicago-brewed version and you're left with a locally made simulacrum.”
But the label still says “Goose Island IPA,” and the beer tastes more or less the same. So is it the same beer? “The hyperreality comes in when people think that they're drinking the authentic article, but they're not,” St. John clarifies. “The simulation has been substituted for it, and if you didn't know then you'd exist with the hyperreal version of it. The function of the object hasn't changed, but the qualities of it have.”
This is easy enough to understand in the context of a beer brewed under contract for a provincial market, or in the bottle of Duff Beer I found in a minimarket in Venice when I was 16—sadly, it tasted real and awful enough. Beyond St. John’s specific example, though, simulation takes place throughout the beer industry. Arguably, the whole of the industry is itself a simulation.
In his 1988 work Selected Writings, Baudrillard wrote—falsely quoting Ecclesiastes in an example of postmodern obfuscation of truth—that “the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” Here, he states that the simulacrum replaces the truth, and in turn, replaces the original. But given that hyperreality is tied to notions of copies without originals, is there such a thing as a true original to begin with?
“Not if we take [American literary critic Harold] Bloom’s theory on the anxiety of influence as holding true—essentially arguing that, given the expectation of broad cultural and literary knowledge expected of a contemporary artists, there’s no way they can come up with anything that isn’t reflective of something that already exists, which leads to a state of creative paralysis,” says Goodman. “However, Bloom is countered by [American scholar and poetry critic Marjorie] Perloff’s idea of ‘unoriginal genius,’ that whilst nothing is wholly new, there is still room for creative and meaningful expression through reinterpretation, reworking, and remaking.”
In beer, “Verdant [Brewing Co]’s Ply Me a River might be a good example of this,” says Goodman. “[The beer combines] intertextuality—the reference to Russian River’s Pliny the Elder, as well as Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River”—irony, pastiche, and parody, but result[s] in a pleasurable experience all the same. Something that is enhanced if the consumer is in on the joke and gets the references.”
Though the pun- and witticism-adorned beers that are rife within craft beer might be labeled originals by their creators, that they rely on references to other extant objects, names, and concepts rules out their originality.
“I believe ‘originality’ is a construct,” agrees Jackson-Beckham. “It’s a way of framing and understandings things that imparts a particular set of meanings and values. But most ‘originality’ boils down to: ‘I can make a case that this phenomena is unfamiliar enough in this context for me to frame it as an original.’ Craft is both hooked on and completely undermines the notion of originality.”
If you look at Pliny the Elder, first brewed in 1994, or The Alchemist’s Heady Topper, which debuted in 2004, these beers are both commonly considered the “original,” or progenitor, of their respective styles. They both, however, adhere to Jackson-Beckham’s description: as variations of IPA that were unfamiliar enough in their local contexts (it may not be coincidental that both “originated” in semi-rural brewpubs), they were both framed as originals.
If nothing is original, that means everything is a copy of everything else—though sometimes with a few alterations. This idea is key: if everything that exists is endless copies of reality, and we do not question the reality of simulations, then both these endless copies and that which we considered “real” are equally hyperreal. The Goose Island IPA brewed in Ontario is not the original brewed in Chicago, it is a simulacrum—but there are few, if any, discernable differences between the two. As such, both exist as hyperreal.
“This is peak postmodernism—and where a lot of people jump off the boat,” laughs Jackson-Beckham. “Because the two conclusions we draw are one, that nothing is actually ‘real,’ or two, that what is ‘real’ is irrelevant.”
“I would concur that craft beer is an instance of the hyperreal—the signifiers through which we have come to determine ‘craft’ in relation to ‘beer’ do not have an original referent,” says Goodman. These signifiers, whether IPA or Pale Ale, independence or authenticity, are copies with no originals; the supposed foundations of craft beer cannot be traced to a single point.
What we view as ‘craft beer’ is nothing but a series of simulations: though we might see Sierra Nevada Pale Ale as the original craft beer, it is itself a copy of a Pale Ale that came before it. There is no ur-beer or drinking culture that is uniquely grounded in the real, Goodman says.
When I used to run beer tastings, I’d always include a short snippet of beer history, explaining styles’ origins and backstories. When it came to IPA, I’d wax lyrical about ships sailing to India, with sloshing barrels of highly hopped India Pale Ale aboard. It’s a tale many both in and outside of the beer industry have encountered: as the story goes, beer would spoil on the long journeys by sea from London to the Subcontinent, and as a result, brewers made Pale Ales more highly hopped and more alcoholic to prevent this spoilage. This is commonly considered to be the origin of IPA, and the style is often credited to a brewer named Hodgson.
Remember, despite this apparent point of origination, there’s no such thing as an original. The same can be said for IPA: it was merely an adaptation of what was previously considered Pale Ale, itself an adaptation. The term IPA wasn’t coined until later, further casting doubt on the idea of the “birth” of the style.
“IPA is a copy without an original,” says Goodman. “A lot of my research has been on drinking in colonial India—there are high-strength, bitter Pale Ales making their way to India as per the old familiar metanarrative, but they weren’t thought of as this until much later.” Considering that no beer style is a true original, stylistic conventions such as the Beer Judge Certification Program, or BJCP, deal only in simulacra. And few styles better encapsulate the idea than the New England IPA, or NEIPA.
“The iteration of copies has literally allowed people to can hard orange juice and sell it to us as high-end beer,” says Jackson-Beckham. The Hazy IPA is “an extraordinary display of the postmodern at work, the inversion of categories, [the] elevation of pop and kitsch, [and the] questioning of categorical reality.”
Hopheads and hazebros alike might take umbrage at the term “hard orange juice” (or not, given brewers’ propensity to bandy around terms like “juicy”), but it’s a reasonably accurate description. The NEIPA is a beer style with characteristic low bitterness; a good amount of sweetness, residual or perceived; citrus, tropical, and stone fruit flavors; a near-luminous, orangey yellow hue; and impenetrable opacity. See? Orange juice.
This is in stark contrast with previous conceptions of the IPA. The style once hung its hat on its high level of bitterness, for two centuries or more—the very origin of which was supposedly a large addition of bittering hops made by some bloke named Hodgson. If you were to place a pint of IPA from 10 years ago in front of someone with little knowledge of beer alongside a pint of fresh Hazy, they’d think you were mad to call them the same style. Yet, NEIPA has commonly replaced the notion of bitter IPA for many drinkers, and complaints of a given IPA not being “juicy enough” or “hazy enough” are easily found. Though West Coast, Black, Brut (somehow hanging on by a thread), and other IPAs still exist, NEIPA is, by and large, replacing IPA itself.
“NEIPA is frustrating,” says St. John. “I was in London 16 months ago and tried finding an English IPA. I don't mean an IPA made in England. I mean the real-deal, Burton-on-Trent sulfate and berryish malt, big bitter finish English IPA.” In many places, big, bitter English IPA has now become the exception, not the rule.
“It's just that you have taken a beer defined by bitterness and have subverted it through emulation,” St. John says. “Whatever technical trappings existed as part and parcel of IPA are replaced. It's high alcohol and bitter, right? Well, to get to NEIPA, we sacrificed malt character. We switched out English hop character for international citrus and tropical fruit myrcene bombs. [...] We reduced the bitterness. The most IPA thing about NEIPA is the fact that some of them use English yeast strains. The hallmark of the object is bitterness, but an entire generation would be growing up with the hyperreal version.”
“Maybe the best thing about it,” he continues, “is the hyperreal pronunciation I hear out of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking populations: ‘Neepa.’ Love it. Couldn't be further from the original while still retaining the trappings of it.”
Granted, New England IPA’s not the only offshoot of IPA that purports to be IPA. Black IPA (“an offshoot of the Cascadian Dark Ale of course,” says Goodman; “there were no Black IPAs in India as far as I have found record of, anyway”) is arguably not as IPA as, say, Session IPA—which let’s face it, is a highly hopped Pale Ale. That said, isn’t all IPA simply Pale Ale, adapted?
What’s fascinating, though, is when brewers get creative. As the meme Rule 34 states, if it exists, there is porn of it. Similarly, if a baked good or confectionery exists, then, somewhere, it’s been hurled into a mash tun or fermenting vessel with reckless abandon.
“We’re at this extrapolation of the beer industry where beers have become undrinkable. And I do mean that,” says the head of Harbour Brewing Co’s experimental brewing, James Rylance. “If you replace every baton on a ship, if you replaced every single part of the Cutty Sark, over the years, would it still be the same boat? Is there a spirit in the machine; is there an identity that exists regardless of the physical form? If it’s made out of hops and malt, it has an alcohol level, it was fermented by yeast, will that always be beer? Or do we have a construct that we think has to be beer?”
The basic idea of “beer” is far from fixed. The common cultural understanding of “beer” 100 years ago would look significantly different from the “beer” of today, and different again from the “beer” of a millennium ago. The constituent ingredients might broadly remain consistent across centuries, though the cultural value assigned to the resulting drink is mutable.
So, “beer” is not fixed. But by the same token, it’s problematic to say that beer brewed with every bizarre and absurd adjunct under the sun isn’t beer. As my colleague Jonny Garrett pointed out in a recent Twitter conversation, beer has been brewed with varied add-ins since its inception: “fruit, herbs and spices aren't a new thing. They have been part of brewing culture for millennia. There is no fixed ‘beer flavour’ it varies across time and continents. It is what makes beer great - no other drink has the variety and excitement.”
In the debate that arose from Garrett’s tweets, two general camps emerged: those who preferred their beer to “taste like beer,” and those who believed that the variety and innovation present in contemporary brewing lead to experimental beers that are still just as legitimately beery. By extending the line of reasoning of those in the former camp, beer that doesn’t taste “like beer” is therefore not beer. Imperial Stout? Beer, obviously. That same Imperial Stout, but with added Pop Tarts? Clearly not beer.
This longing, both in drinkers seeking “beer that tastes of beer” and in those pining for the return of resinous West Coast IPAs, serves as evidence of an absence of the real. “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning,” writes University of Opole academic Ryszard W. Wolny in the European Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. “There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared.”
“The movement itself requires delving into another Baudrillardian concept: that of culturally assigned value to objects,” says St. John. “We can agree, I think, that the function of beer has not changed a great deal; alcoholic beverage with ingredients in some permutative form. So the question is, what makes people camp out at night outside Other Half in Brooklyn to spend $18 for a four-pack of cans? You could spend less money on the same amount of beer and the quality would probably not be much different, and you wouldn't have to catch a nap on a sidewalk. I mean, the Imperial Stout they're making would be a hyperreal version of the original from Southwark [in London], but the hyperreality is less important than the perceived cultural value. The object is whatever it is, but the cultural currency of putting it on Instagram is immensely valuable to someone who has chosen to follow that method of demonstrating their value through high-status objects.”
If we can describe contemporary beer and brewing as a Baudrillardian simulation, then the idea that beer culture is itself a simulation is a compelling one. In his contentious 1991 book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Baudrillard claimed that “contemporary wars are being fought as much on the battlefields as on television,” writes Wolny, “and thus one cannot dissolve the physical reality from its media representation, particularly in the context of military operations and their political and ideological motivations. [...] Thus ‘real time’ information loses itself in a completely unreal space, finally furnishing the images of pure, useless, instantaneous television where its primordial function irrupts, namely that of filling a vacuum, blocking up the screen hole through which escapes the substance of events.”
Baudrillard’s ideas can certainly be applied to online beer culture and the concept of consumption. Beer festivals are a good example: it’s hard to walk more than three feet without bumping into someone holding their glass up to the light, phone at the ready, to share an image of their beer to Untappd, Instagram, or any other given social media channel. I’ve seen attendees at beer tastings ignoring one another while they rate beers on Untappd, and watched as conversations faltered as the ones happening online took priority. Of course, this behavior isn’t just found within beer culture—it’s symptomatic of a society ruled by tele-technologies generally—but it bears a strong resemblance to Baudrillard’s assertion of “‘real time’ information losing itself in a completely unreal space,” and questions what it means to consume beer at all. If there’s no photograph, no rating, or no record of your beer, did you even drink it?
“This is actually a very compelling notion,” says Jackson-Beckham. “‘Real’ consumption used to be sitting in a pub with some pints with your mates, but now it’s checking in or reviewing [...] on Untappd. It seems like the online consumption carries the weight of the hyperreal that Baudrillard wrote about.”
“This is partly what I was meaning [when] I spoke of the distinction between the mediated ‘unreal' of digital culture and the real of everyday existence fusing in the contemporary present,” explains Goodman. “Photographing and recording your drinking through apps and other means is no longer a way of participating in beer culture, but has become beer culture.”
Beyond social media or beer-rating apps, the technological has replaced the personal in numerous ways, as recently accelerated by the pandemic. In a number of pubs in the U.K., you can order beer to your table via an app, thus removing the former necessity of speaking to another human. Likewise with socializing: #CraftBeerHour and the short-lived Tweet Inn have acted as online drinking spaces.
“The thing is that, since your online avatar exists as a hyperreal simulacra of yourself and participates in the craft beer system of objects, you're constantly jockeying for position for the worth of your own simulacra and that frequently involves flaming other people for the cultural position that they occupy,” says St. John, of the online beer community. “Crabs in a Baudrillardian bucket. Why on earth should anyone care about what other people like and don't like? Well, you can devalue someone else's position by making sure that the other arbiters of the systemic value of objects know that the interpretation of hierarchical value is incorrect. How many followers do you have? Where do you sit on the great craft beer league table? Eventually, you might even ask whether the function of the culturally delineated version of the product is different. Does it exist merely to be argued over?”
Does it even exist at all? Probably, but how real is any of this? With exploding cans and abounding absurdity, who’s to say we’re not all living in a Matrix-esque computer simulation? I’m not sure, but I’ll be mulling it over a fresh pint of the unreal in an online pub very soon.
“Friend… there are donuts in beer,” muses Jackson-Beckham, adopting a somewhat more nihilist stance. “Nothing means anything anymore.”
Words by Lily WaiteIllustrations by Colette Holston
