From journalist Brendan O’Neill, writing online for Spectator Life (U.K.), via The Wall Street Journal, 6/10/16:
I can forgive most hipster sins. The beards. The preference for vinyl records in an era when you can have a million songs on a gadget…But so long as I live I will never forgive the hip for what they’ve done to beer.
They’ve spiked this most democratic drink with snobbery. The craft-beer movement…has brought the fussiness of the wine-sipper into the unfussy world of the beer-drinker….
Hip haters of anything inauthentic have now moved into microbrewing and made it ‘artisan’. Which used to mean ‘things made by hand’ but now means ‘things plebs don’t buy that are therefore good’….
It’s not authenticity these weirdly consumerist critics of consumer society seek—it’s exclusivity, the feeling of belonging to a switched-on gang who, unlike the rest of us, can resist the lure of the chain pub and its cheap push. To drink Maple Bacon Coffer Porter (seriously) is to say: ‘I’m better than you.’
I hate this snootiness because beer is the everyman drink; after water and tea the most popular drink on earth…In the Middle Ages, when water wasn’t always safe, peasants turn to cheap, trusty beer for hydration. Now there’s a beer called The End of History costing £500 a bottle.
