Rethinking Beer: Histories and Futures of Tastes, Practices, and Reproduction for a Post-Growth World

WILL LAFLEUR

Rethinking Beer: Histories and Futures of Tastes, Practices, and Reproduction for a Post-Growth World

 Speaking from the perspective first of an amateur home-brewer and forager, and second as a social anthropologist, this lecture takes a historical view to consider beer-making as a practice of household reproduction in which beer was generally considered also food and/or medicine, in which various herbs other than hops were used, where wild yeasts were gathered or recycled to induce fermentation, and where the sensuous experience of making or tasting beer was incredibly diverse from place to place. Starting from the 16th century with laws and edicts describing which herbs were allowed to be used in beer making, and accelerating with 19th-century industrial and technological trajectories of standardisation, there has been a transition of beer-making from homes and villages to large-scale, growth-oriented production that has significantly reduced the diversity of beer in terms of ingredients, yeasts, and tastes. As such, many of the older elements of beer-making remain somewhat relegated to the past, linger in niche corners of the beer-making world, or are otherwise completely invisible—especially to a Western gaze and in regards to certain types of grain-based alcoholic beverages not generally considered “beer”. Fermentation revivalists and visual anthropologists have helped to shine a light on not only the revival of some of these practices, but also on the fact that in the majority world, home and village-level beer-making practices continue to persist. Overall, the lecture outlines these historical trajectories of beermaking and contemplates the rise and continuation of these “new-old” home-brewing practices in relation to the mass industrialization of alcohol making, the homogenization of taste, and the potentials of re-enskilled, DIY beer production for a post-growth world.

Will LaFleur is a Doctoral Researcher in Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. His research interests lie In-between anthropology, human geography, political ecology, critical agrarian studies and is a member of the EXALT Initiative (Extractivisms and Alternatives). His recent research interests centre on wild fermentation practices in relation to the political economy/ecology of global food hygiene regulations, global corporate food regimes, and small-scale farmer-producers. In all of these areas he has an abiding interest the politics of ways of knowledge and ways of knowing;  theory-methods in scholarly-activist practice; sensory and visual ethnography, more-than-representational theories, and arts-based research practice.

 Seminar will be held in English.

No registration is needed.