I suspect you’re right about the technical issues being relevant. Tell you what, next time you’re down here, why don’t we head out for either a pint or a coffee and chat about them (I’m near Ottawa South, so we could go to Bridgehead if you like)?

As for beer expertise, I didn’t really want to geek out on you. But I do think some of these issues are relevant. Both in terms of the timeline for Canadian beer competition, and the synchronic dimensions of cultural issues in beer and identity.

I’ve never claimed to be an expert on beer – except, possibly, on the drinking end . Honestly, I was using the post as an exploration of a larger theoretical model and, while I am planning on publishing the model, I know that I don’t know beer well enough to use it in the article.

If I do decide to use it, however, I know exactly who to talk to .

On a (vaguely) related note, do you ever get down to Ottawa?

Some of your statements about beer itself are either imprecise or slightly inaccurate. Not a problem in a blogpost but if you want to publish on the topic, it might be a good idea to have the text checked for beer expertise. For instance, the issue of alcohol content is mostly a matter of perception: until recently, alcohol by weight (ABW) was used in the United States (not on labels, though), whereas alcohol by volume (ABV) is more common throughout the world. A typical pilsner-type lager in the U.S. or Canada is 5.0% ABV which, according to a ABV-ABW converter, is just below 4.0% ABW. The perception that U.S. beers were lighter than Canadian beers has remained but it wasn’t usually that accurate.
Also, alcohol content has varied quite a bit over the years for several reasons. The initial move toward lower alcohol beer was associated with a number of factors, including gender issues. There’s quite a bit of semi-academic research on the subject and fairly little peer-reviewed literature. The bottomline seems to be that alcohol content hasn’t followed a straightforward pattern based on a single factor.
The perception that darker beers are tastier is still very present in the general population. But the craft beer movement has done a lot to help change this perception. Here in Montreal, more and more people come to understand that there’s little correlation between flavour profile and beer colour. Also, porters and stouts are increasingly being recognized for their potential in crossing gender barriers (thanks to their associations with coffee and chocolate). As you probably know, Guinness Stout is one of the lowest-calorie beers available commercially.
About Sleeman (now a Sapporo property). It’s an interesting context for a Canadian case study, especially if you include its acquisitions over the years. One of its early acquisitions was Upper Canada, a respected brewery with a very distinctive yeast strain. After having issues with that yeast strain affecting some of its other beers, Sleeman allegedly destroyed the Upper Canada strain and even sold the yeast propagators. Upper Canada beers brewed by Sleeman now are very similar to other Sleeman beers. In other words, Sleeman contributed to the consolidation which is dominating the commercial beer world in many parts of North America and Europe (including Germany and Belgium, but excluding Scandinavia, Italy, and Mexico which are increasing their beer diversity).
When Sleeman bought Unibroue, a couple of years ago, the fear was that it would kill Unibroue’s line-up. While a few products have disappeared, Sleeman-owned Unibroue didn’t change so much in terms of product diversity. In fact, one might say that the biggest change had happened several years prior, when Unibroue changed many of its recipes and got rid of some of its brands. After the purchase, most people thought that Sleeman was buying an extensive distribution network. Their official stance was that their purchase of Unibroue was a way to protect some Canadian breweries from buyout by outside interests. So much for that.
Of course, the commercial beer landscape has changed radically in the past fifteen years or so. Labatt has been owned by Interbrew since 1995 (long before the renamed InBev was able to get a hold of Anheuser-Busch). Alexander Keith’s, Oland, Kokanee, and Lakeport are all owned by Labatt (so, they are all properties of InBev). Labatt also tried its hand at fake micro “Saint-Urbain” (a direct attack on McAuslan-RJ). Molson and Coors have merged to form Molson Coors and then built the MillerCoors entity with SABMiller. Molson owns O’Keefe, Rickard’s, Carling, Creemore Springs, etc. (Coors owns Blue Moon, Keystone, Zima, Caffrey, and Killian’s. Rickard’s White is probably the same beer as Blue Moon witbier.)
If I’m not mistaken, Moosehead may at this point be the largest brewery to be completely owned by Canadian interests. Its agreement with McAuslan-RJ is part of a “Canadian strategy” which may work better than the Sleeman one.

Oh, also… It might be interesting to talk about alcohol prohibitions in Canada and the United States. They certainly have had a lot of impact on the beer-related trade between the two countries. The successive prohibitions in Canada and then the United States (diverse periods from 1898 to 1933) had less impact on beer diversity than most people tend to think (brewery consolidations had been happening before the prohibitions). But that era of prohibitions certainly serves a purpose in the Canadian beer timeline.

Maybe a touch off topic, but definitely on point . I’ve had similar talks with Quebecois friends and seen some of the similarities when in Quebec. Maybe notions of constructing a public identity as part of a habitus?

What’s funny, to me, is that it’s often easy to replace “Canada” with “Quebec” and “United States” with “Canada” in those discussions. The way many Québécois feel about Canada is pretty much the same way many Canadians feel about the United States. The broader story is also very similar.
In Quebec, the anti-US stance has a very different meaning than in other parts of Canada. Especially among Francophones but even among Anglophones. Sure, you can hear Quebec activists from diverse communities criticize U.S. imperialism in the wide world. Some Québécois intellectuals even adopt a dismissive attitude toward Anglo cultural trends (especially in creative arts), lumping together the United States and Anglo Canada. But you infrequently hear people complain about the very existence of the United States of the type of xenophobic comments I’ve heard in New Brunswick, Ontario, and through the Canadian diaspora.
Yet there is an anti-Canadian discourse in Quebec (even among several Anglophones). About as nasty as the anti-US discourse in the rest of Canada.
Many people lump together Quebec sovereignty with nationalism but they really are two very different social phenomena. Problem is, those two social phenomena are merged by eager politicians on any side of the issues. Yet, neither sovereignty nor nationalism correlate so well with anti-Canadian sentiment among Quebeckers. Some staunch federalists in Quebec (including Anglos) are actually very vocal against “Canadian culture” and many sovereignists and nationalists appreciate Canada as a lovely country that they occasionally visit.

What does this have to do with your original text? I don’t know, yet. I’ll find something. Notions of pride and “patriotism” may help.

BTW, yes, “national culture traits” fit really well, here.

I’ve never been involved in the craft beer culture myself, but from what you and a few friends who are peripherally involved have mentioned, I think your exactly right about the social mobility idea. I have studied Scotch and Rye cultures and the recent re-emergence of cocktails, and it appears to me at least that a similar pattern of craft/knowledge specialization comes out in them as well.

The “We are not American” meme is one of the trickier ones I’ve seen in Canadian culture. I believe that there is a similar one in Belgium (“We are not French”), but I only have that from a couple of friends who lived there.

Part of the problem is that Canad is not based on a single ethnic group even in our beginnings. I am about 90% certain that a lot of “national culture traits” (I know, it’s a lousy concept, but I think it is applicable here) stem from the fact the we, as a “nation” are not really a “people”. I also think that having the US next to us, and having had a history of them invading us, played a significant part in setting that meme up.

I’ll certainly grant you that there is a minority who use “American” as a reference to people who live in the Americas in much the same manner as a “German” is a “European”. Personally, the only ones I know who use it that way also have a very particular political stance (one I have little use for).

From what I can see, most of the anti-US stance in Anglophone Canada comes out of our evolving competitive set with the US from before its founding through to the present: the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Fenian raids, concerns about the Union invading us after they had eliminated the Confederacy, a shift to increased US economic dominance, etc.

My grandmother used a variant of the meme which, actually, probably captures the sentiment better – “We are americans who do not accept he suzerainty of the President of the US” (a take-off on the old saying about Anglicans and the Pope). That works for a 19th-early 20th century version, but isn’t really understood nowadays .

I’ve been fascinated for a while by what Canadian beers Americans view as “status” beers, mainly because I, met my wife as a result of her love of Molson Golden (she’s from Princeton and we met in the US).

My personal perspective is that of an actual participant-observer in some homebrewing and beer geek circles in both Canada and the United States (Qc, IN, IL, NB, MA, TX). Sounds like very small a niche but “craft beer culture” does have wider-ranging connections. Many beer geeks are fighting older perceptions of beer. Often using wine as the contrast case.

(BTW… I’m a French-speaking ethnographer from Montreal but most of my observations have been made, informally, in English-speaking contexts.)

Goffman does seem to work well, in this context. So could Barthes (adapting and extending his wine and milk analysis).

An idea I like to bandy about is that beer geekery is very advantageous for socially mobile individuals because it shows many traits of sophistication (attention to detail, passion, creativity, etc.) without being perceived too sophisticated, snotty, or European. Unlike a wine snob, a beer geek can still be “a normal guy.” (Though Gary Vaynerchuk is helping people change the perception from “wine as a snob drink” to “wine as a social drink.”)
I do notice regional differences in terms of craft beer culture, but it’s still not entirely clear to me. Beer geeks tend not to emphasize the distinction between U.S. and Canada so much but they do emphasize the success of regional breweries and some people discuss differences in regional tastes. The history of alcohol in North America can help distinguish diverse tendencies on both sides of the border, but those tendencies tend not to be that “national” within craft beer culture.

BTW, I would take issue with this statement:

Canada is one of the few cultures in the world to define itself negatively, as in “We are not American”.

Isn’t negative definition a very common pattern? Fredrik Barth isn’t the only one to have observed boundaries and some go as far as to include negative definition as a core component of any process of identity negotiation. Granted, it’s not always based on differences in political entities. But the nationalist era did give us a lot of “Us/Them” of this type.
Also, many (Anglophone) Canadians are adamant in their use of the term “American” to refer to people of the Americas. Some friends from different parts of Canada have reacted very strongly to the use of “American” as a label for citizens of the United States. So, to many people who care deeply about their Canadianness, “We are not American” sounds like an awkward way to phrase their anti-U.S. stance (which is often left unquestioned). Sounds like nitpicking, especially since I didn’t read the whole blogpost. But the statement happened to catch my eye because Canadian anti-U.S. nationalism is very intriguing to a Québécois.

I think you’re right about default beers; I’ve been experimenting with exactly this in my captaining of a tennis team with a post-match beer tradition. There’s actually a process of wiggling toward consensus that’s quite contingent; one of our mates works for Anheiser-Busch, for example, so their products are high in the range of possibles out of solidarity.

And there’s very definitely a class dimension to ‘taste’, as Bourdieu has shown, so my willingness as a college professor to drink and enjoy Bud is in some sense understood to be declassifying and efforts are made to provide me with darker alternatives.

Btw, when I was in my teens in the late 70s we had various quite nice products of local breweries to choose from in eastern Pennsylvania, but the ‘special occasion’ beers were Molsen’s Golden and, for the rebel cogniscenti, Moosehead; even though they were dramatically more expensive and, as far as we could tell, no tastier.