The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Beer Places: The Microgeographies of Craft Beer, edited by Daina Cheyenne Harvey, Ellis Jones, and Nate Chapman. Beer Places will be published as part of the Food and Foodways Series at the University of Arkansas Press.
Beer Places is, at its most basic level, a roadmap of craft beer, a beverage and a business that has become synonymous with place. Be it brewery advertisements that emphasize ingredient sourcing or the defining of new artisanal styles with local appellations, the establishment of beer trails or the development of policies to protect certain beers based on certified origin, the indications that beer has arrived as a product and practice that defines cultural space just as much as cheese or wine or bread opens up myriad new opportunities to understand how people build social structures and organize community movements. With a number of stops in taprooms, breweries, and bottle shops from North Carolina to Helsinki, New Jersey to Zimbabwe, the twenty-three essays and entries in this book do just that, exploring the microgeographies of the beloved brew and its diverse congregations of devotees.
The trio of sociologists at the wheel of this road trip bring together a group of voices that includes academic researchers and beer professionals: specialists in the social sciences and liberal arts who use beer as an investigative lens as well as beer bloggers, travel writers, and food entrepreneurs who share their lived study of the beverage’s power to connect people and places. Gathered into sections that speak to authenticity and revitalization, politics and economics, and collectivity and collaboration, the pieces here include not only academic chapters with focus on new research but also a series of postcards from the field, informal conversations and first-person dispatches that transport readers to the real spaces where pints are shared, networks are forged, and spatial practices are lived, breathed, and brewed.
Ultimately, what these contributions find is that craft beer culture is different in different places, and while certain demographics and socioeconomic conditions seem to matter for craft beer, what we might call the placeness of beer remains understudied. This edited volume seeks to explore the reasons for and the outcomes of that placeness, making sense of the suds for readers from all beer-loving backgrounds.
Daina Cheyenne Harvey is associate professor of sociology at the College of the Holy Cross. Ellis Jones is associate professor of sociology at the College of the Holy Cross. Nathaniel G. Chapman is associate professor of sociology at Arkansas Tech University.
Food and Foodways is a series from the University of Arkansas Press that explores historical and contemporary topics in global food studies. The series is committed to representing a diverse set of voices that tell lesser known food stories and to provoking new avenues of interdisciplinary research. Its strengths are works in the humanities and social sciences that use food as a critical lens to examine broader cultural, environmental, and ethical issues.