“Brewing Change”: Advocacy in Craft Brewing in the United States

Over the past several decades, craft brewing has altered physical and cultural landscapes across the United States as fermentation industries have increasingly been at the center of civic (re)development activities. Fermented landscapes are now ubiquitous, producing and maintaining a variety of public goods, whether perceived as beneficial or not. Some breweries offer highly visible examples of advocacy efforts, including the pursuit and promotion of environmental sustainability initiatives or profit-sharing to benefit various causes. It is unclear, however, how prevalent (or, alternatively, extraordinary) these kinds of activities are. Although craft breweries have been studied as agents of landscape change previously, they remain understudied as sociocultural actors that advocate for particular issues or outcomes. Thus, to better understand the kinds of advocacy that breweries pursue, we conducted a qualitatively informed quantitative analysis (including qualitative coding, descriptive statistics, and two analytical visualization techniques) on a random sample of 400 craft breweries in the United States. The resulting typology of advocacy in craft brewing identifies three dozen distinct techniques and approximately two dozen themes of action across three broad axes of advocacy, clarifying how breweries engage in environmental, social (justice), and economic initiatives in both active and passive ways.