If you pay attention, you’ll probably notice that life is repetition, at least to a degree. By this I don’t mean repetition in the sense of reincarnation, whereby we die, are born anew, and live again, or even repetition in the sense of Plato, Pythagoras, and Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return, in which we live the same life over and over again, but rather that there are a number of recurrences or repeating themes within our lives.
A new friend, for example, might look and sound almost exactly like an old friend, even though you are certain, or nearly so, that they are in fact different people. Settings and locations can appear to repeat, especially in the unoriginal design of many modern bars and taprooms. No matter how carefully you try to live your life, it’s common to find yourself in personal or professional situations that resemble previous scenarios, as if the tapestry of our time on Earth is composed of just a few clearly recurring patterns. In my own life, I’ve noticed that I have frequently had almost the exact same conversation with different brewers, in different countries and in different years. It usually starts when I ask, “Why do you brew so many beers?”
Brewing loads of different beers is not a very original proposition, of course. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard folks from breweries—generally new breweries—say things like, “We pride ourselves on brewing a huge variety of styles,” or even, “We’ve never brewed the same beer twice,” which makes you want to ask, then, if any of them were good. (If the answer is yes, why not brew them again? If the answer is no, you are probably due for a career change.) High numbers are common almost everywhere. A few years back, Colorado’s WeldWerks Brewing famously released 130 new beers in 12 months. Last year, at least two West Virginia breweries released 60 new beers apiece. The last time I had a version of this conversation, I was talking with a brewer from a Croatian craft brewery that released a new beer in a different style every week, with over 50 new recipes every year.
In that conversation I repeated something I’ve said several times before: that, as far as I can tell, most of the greatest breweries didn’t achieve success by brewing hundreds of new styles. The biggest names in brewing history—Guinness, Pilsner Urquell, Bass, even brands like Heineken and Carlsberg—got there largely on the back of a single beer or type of beer, rather than the near-infinite variety of a new style every week. Even Sierra Nevada, hardly a tradition-bound brand, achieved much of its success because of its best-selling Pale Ale.
The question the brewer asked in return was simple: But why shouldn’t we brew a new style every week?
Unlike most of my conversations, I didn’t have a well-rehearsed response ready. It took me a few months of reflection to realize why I don’t like even hearing about breweries that are putting out 130 or even just 50 new beers in a year, to say nothing of writing about them. It’s because I think they are wasting resources, including perhaps the most important resource of all.
When I talk about wasted resources in brewing, I don’t mean hops, although modern craft brewers certainly have bumped up against the law of diminishing returns in terms of hopping rates. I don’t mean water, either, although water conservation should be a major concern for all of us at this point. What I’m thinking of is a nearly impossible-to-renew resource for most of human civilization: our attention.
Just like anyone who makes anything, every brewery is, at some level, asking for attention: attention from consumers; from vendors, distributors, and other business partners; from society; even from lowly journalists and critics. Attention is one of the many forms of exchange that take place between a brewery and its public. Although there are more obvious examples—like paying cash for a four-pack or sampling a beer and then leaving a rating on Untappd—the very first transaction between a maker with goods for sale and any potential audience is one of attention. Before any beer can be tasted and given 2.5 stars and a review that states, “Pretty good for a Lager but I don’t like Lagers,” the customer must pay attention. (Technically, brewers could run around grabbing potential customers unawares, wresting open their jaws, and quickly pouring in half-liters of haze, but such measures are largely frowned upon nowadays.)
This payment of attention is not for nothing: In the end, it is supposed to be worth it for the customer. There is, after all, a finite amount of attention anyone is capable of giving. By extension, the amount of attention we are all capable of as a society is similarly finite. It is a limited resource.
My personal problem with breweries that make 50 or more new beers each year is that they seem to be asking for more attention than they deserve—they are asking for more than their fair share. If attention really is a limited resource, this is not very different from a brewery that takes more than its fair share of water or hops.
And this is where I get to BrewDog.
There have been a number of reports, including a recent BBC documentary, that have focused on allegations of serious wrongdoing at BrewDog, ranging from employee harassment to the flouting of U.S. legal regulations. By comparison, it sounds like very small potatoes to point out that BrewDog has committed another misdeed: For years, it has sucked up far more than its fair share of attention.
These numbers might be hard to believe, but Google turns up fewer than 1,000 results for “craft beer” and “craft brewery” in total on bbc.co.uk, while a search for “BrewDog” returns over 53,000 results from the same site. These are all generally so-called news stories about beers with inappropriate names (Speedball), gross or misleading packaging (The End of History, fake “solid gold” beer cans), or bullshit world records (Tactical Nuclear Penguin, etc.)—generally not about beer itself, but about its marketing.
This is not just taking more than your fair share of the spotlight. This is a kind of strip-mining of the media, the clearcutting of consumer attention. For those of us who try to follow the big picture of global beer culture, it has long been extremely tiresome. It is like a single screaming child who constantly demands that the adults all look at him, while 30 or 40 other wonderful children nearby patiently wait their turn. In a world of limited attention, it feels wasteful.
The last few years have seen the uncovering of many deep faults within the world of beer, from racism to sexual harassment. One thing that strikes me, over and over, is that we seem to learn that breweries committing one kind of wrongdoing are often also guilty of other evils: not just the sexual harassment, but also the racism; not just a hostile work environment, but also some TTB fraud; not only wage theft, but also the pollution of local waterways. There is no causal relationship, of course, between something like a tasteless beer label and willful violation of the labor code, but that overlap does seem to have come up more than once.
So the next time brewers ask me why they shouldn’t brew 50 or 100 new beers per year, I’ll have my pat, well-rehearsed answer at the ready: I’ll tell them it’s a waste of consumers’ time and attention. I’ll try to convince them that they should be brewing the best beers they can make, not the most beers they can make. I’ll argue that drinkers who are turned off by one gimmicky beer of the week might never return.
But in the back of my mind, I’ll be thinking about the forms of repetition I’ve seen in my life, focusing on the patterns I need to recognize.
