Anthropology of Beer Ben Bean

Aguadilla, Puerto Rico - A conversation with Jorge Castro of Boxlab Brewing Company
Before I even thought about doing any sort of ethnographic research on beer, I was doing some preliminary fieldwork on an entirely different topic. So I went to Aguadilla, a city on the northwest coast of Puerto Rico, and on my very first night there, I found out about a small brewery called Del Barril, just down the road from my Airbnb. Very cool brewery attached to an amazing restaurant called El Picnic (by the way, rest in peace to the chef, Benny Beeler, who did some of the most incredible things with Puerto Rican cuisine). I absolutely loved this place from the very first visit. Now, this was in August of 2017, right before two hurricanes devastated Puerto Rico. Long story short, the owners of Del Barril sold their business shortly after the storms, a fate suffered by many businesses around the islands. Fortunately, the buyer was another local brewer, Jorge Castro of Boxlab Brewing Company.

You’ll hear some of this story straight from the Jorge’s mouth today, but this episode is more than a conversation about Boxlab. We talk about the Puerto Rican craft beer movement in general and how the local natural and social environments influence beer drinkers’ tastes. You’ll learn about some of the challenges facing brewers in Puerto Rico and how they have managed to work through them. Despite being in a hot, tropical climate, and despite several earthquakes, hurricanes, economic and infrastructural setbacks, and the psychological toll of being the “world’s oldest colony,” as many of the locals say, breweries like Boxlab are not only sustaining a precarious industry; they’re brewing beer they can be proud of and incorporating local flavors that their communities can relate to.

Music by Wataboi from Pixabay

For the first episode of this podcast, I wanted to talk about a concept I've thought about a lot over the years, from my work in food service to my ethnographic research: the concept of "the local." We hear about this in the beer world all the time, and it really matters to consumers, brewers, farmers, and many other people who work in the industry. But what makes something "local" isn't exactly universally defined. Something might be brewed locally, but most of the ingredients could come from the other side of the country or the world. Water is almost universally sourced locally, but breweries often adjust the pH or mineral content to reproduce the qualities of water from somewhere far away, in order to make a particular style of beer as authentically as possible. Then there are questions like, where is the brewer from, who invests in this company, how widely is this beer distributed, and how well does the brand represent the local culture?

In her ethnography from 2012, The Life of Cheese, anthropologist Heather Paxson writes about artisanal cheese producers in the U.S., and one of my big takeaways from her work is how buying local is an important ethical and political decision for many people. She writes about what she calls "economies of sentiment," or how networks of artisanal cheese producers, the people who buy their products, and all of the different people, places, and resources in between (to say nothing of the cows and other animals and microorganisms involved) are linked through various impassioned discourses about sustainability, nature, identity, authenticity, independence and interdependence, terroir, social responsibility, and so on. How people feel about their choices in production and consumption really matters in artisanal markets, and craft beer is no exception.

In thinking about what makes something local, I'm reminded of the work of another anthropologist, Arjun Appadurai, who discusses what he calls “the production of locality” in his 1996 book, Modernity at Large. He explains locality as relational, contextual, and phenomenological. In other words, instead of looking at the local setting as a static, spatial context in which social life takes place, place itself is socially produced. We make “the local” through the various interactions, values, and symbols we share, so naturally it is a dynamic and contested thing, especially as globalization transforms our world by the minute.

And this brings me to the location of today’s episode. I am a local of Delaware County, Pennsylvania. I grew up here, I currently live here... and today I’m visiting a local brewery: 2SP Brewing Company. This is a highly acclaimed, award-winning brewery that just happens to be right down the road from where I live, so I’m really excited to feature 2SP to kick off this podcast. I’ll be speaking with Mike Contreras, 2SP’s director of sales and marketing — though, if you look at their website, 2spbrewing.com, it looks like his official title is... “Powerlifter”? If that intrigues you, stick around to the end of the conversation for an announcement about a special powerlifting event later this month at the brewery.