What nerds bring us is both choice and the constant insistence that we are choosing wrong

From Annoying Connoisseurs Make Things Better for the Rest of Us by Freddie deBoer.  

His argument is akin to the almost iron law that whatever is an expensive and elite consumer fad today, it will be consumed cheaply by the masses within a few years.  If you want expanding choices for the masses, you have to permit the indulgences of the elite.  Whatever they consume now expensively, the masses will consume cheaply later.  

The Puritanical/Ideological position is usually to deny that the wealthy should be allowed to have that which others do not.  They think they are equalizing but they are retarding progress for everyone owing to a blindspot in their moral retina.  

Freddie deBoer is arguing a) the fanaticism and preciousness of beer nerds is irritating, and 2) through the emergence of the internet, passionate small communities of taste have generated a far greater variety of beer choice for all beer consumers everywhere.  

Here’s something that the Youth of Today will never understand: how much better beer selection is these days.

When I first came of legal drinking age in 20021, if you went to a liquor store (affectionately known as a “packie” in my native Connecticut), your choices were Bud, Bud Light, Coors Light, Michelob, maybe Molson, Corona, maybe Heineken. Even at the giant warehouse store Connecticut Beverage Mart, where we would troll for $9.99 30 racks of PBR, your options were only increased by a few more very-similar American lagers and light versions like Natty Light and Icehouse and (ye gods) Milwaukee’s Best. Maybe thrown in Killian’s and Sapporo. It was a bleak scene. If you loved Bud, that was fine, but even most diehards would like a little variety every once in awhile. And while I meant to frame this purely in terms of range of choices - I am studiously trying to avoid making subjective value judgments about the beers you could buy in the early aughts - well… they weren’t very good, if I’m being honest.

But now? Now I can get more variety in the average gas station than I could once get in a liquor store. It’s crazy. I can walk into a nondescript corner store here in the city and expect to find beer made by specific mid-sized breweries from Michigan. It’s not “will there be a stout?,” it’s “will there be one stout other than Guinness, or two?” The range of IPAs is crazy. I don’t worry “will there be an IPA,” I wonder “will there just be English and West Coast IPAs, or perhaps also a double and a session?” At a bar I can choose a porter so smoky it’s like drinking an ashtray, triple IPAs so hoppy your whole body puckers, sweet sours and sour shandies, delicate pilsners and throaty bocks, bitter bitters and smooth cream ales, and yes, American lagers of every hue and taste you can imagine. And of course the ancillary sweet-alcohol products like seltzers and malt beverages never stop multiplying, but I guess that’s unrelated. (Although I never do see the humble wine cooler anymore.) Choice in beer exploded in ways that it did not in many other products.

What happened? Snobs happened. Nerds happened. Connoisseurs happened. For good and for bad. Here are two ways to think about it.

My interest in beer is de minimis but deBoer makes an adjacent argument.  

The internet reveals markets that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. Hopheads have existed forever but few executives in the American beverage industry in the mid-1990s had much reason to believe that the overwhelming dominance of watery American lagers was a bad thing. Those who wanted different tastes could drink imported Kirin or Amstel, right5? But then the internet happened. Subcultures grew. Geographically-disparate people who would never have found each other were able to connect, and to do the only thing people really like to do on the internet, grouse. Pretty soon people came to realize that the absolute dominance of one style of beer and a few imports, also mostly pale lagers, was a drag. These attitudes helped drive an explosion in craft brewers, micro breweries, and homebrew, all of which filtered more diverse and flavorful beers out into the American palate. And the more Joe Sixpack drank IPAs and sours, the more he wanted options and alternatives. The market filled the need, and what started as a niche movement in a few cities became a nation-wide wave that ended up with Gumball Head available at your local Kroger and a limited run of ten kegs of something with an absolutely shit-eating name from an artisanal micro on tap in Bushwick. Cue Tyler Cowen to lead the pro-market tickertape parade!

Also. The internet accelerates and deepens subcultures. It takes the thing you like and makes it into the thing you can’t stop thinking about, the thing that defines you. I happen to think that this has many obvious and profound socially-undesirable consequences. GamerGate, armies of racist Star Wars geeks, the fact that if you say “I’m not a particularly big K-pop fan” on Twitter a laser sight dot will immediately start dancing between your eyeballs…. The very concept of an appropriate love for the things you like died with the advent of America Online. You go into these various forums and the message that is relentlessly drilled into your head is that there is no level of obsession high enough. Your knowledge is your passport and your performance of passion is your value.

He concludes

Nerds gonna nerd, and that is neither good nor bad. What nerds bring us is both choice and the constant insistence that we are choosing wrong.

But real choice wins. It must. Though I certainly have my opinions on the relative quality of the beers available now versus what you could easily buy when I was young, you don’t even really need to make those subjective judgments to see that this state of affairs is better. One of the reasons I don’t understand diatribes against snooty beer culture is that you can still buy Bud Light, or Keystone Light, or Icehouse, or Red Dog, or what have you now. If you’ve been bringing home a six pack of Bud every Friday night for 40 years, nothing’s stopping you from continuing to do so. Just don’t drink with people who use the term “cellaring” and you’ll be fine. And on the flipside, now I get to decide whether I want a Belgian white from Belgium or one from St. Louis when I’m at a fairly average bar. So I thank beer guys for their service; they have helped create a consumer architecture that allows me, somewhat more than a beer novice but much less than a beer nerd, to drink a different good beer of a different variety every night. (Well, a six pack every weekend, these days. Things change, when you get older.) If I want information on what to drink, the internet will deliver a firehose worth, and while I lament the difficulty of drinking from that firehose I know it’s all for the better. Beer guys are the revolutionary vanguard who led the way.