Whiteness and settler colonial logics in the Pacific Northwest hops and craft beer industries

ABSTRACT

The rapidly expanding Pacific Northwest (PNW) craft beer industry and the heralding of Seattle as an epicenter of “hoppy beer” has benefited from geographic proximity to the Yakima Valley, revered by many as the “hops capital of world.” In this article, I center theory from Black studies, Native studies, and critical whiteness studies to examine the intersectional violences of settler colonialism and whiteness as structuring logics of the PNW hops and craft beer industries. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2012 and 2019, I argue that the settler colonial history of PNW hops cultivation and present-day culture of exclusion that extends outward into relationships with craft brewers, sustain a hegemonic whiteness. Moreover, I suggest that craft beer culture in the United States, as a site of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, has benefitted from ongoing dispossession through gentrification and cultural appropriation. By way of conclusion, I discuss the possibilities and limitations of existing attempts to dismantle whiteness within the US craft beer industry.

KEYWORDS:

• Craft beer
• United States
• whiteness
• hops
• settler colonialism
• dispossession

Acknowledgments

Funding for this research was provided by the UA Office for Research, Discovery, and Innovation. My gratitude goes to Natali Valdez, Andrew Curley, Matthew Mars, and the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I’m especially grateful to the two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to significantly enhance the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Scholars might also look to racial hierarchies within the industries sustaining other agricultural commodities and used for beer such as malting grains, as well as to recent efforts building on long-standing struggles among Black and Indigenous farmers in the U.S. to retain or reclaim land for sustaining agrarian livelihoods.

2. However, as observed by Weiler (2022), “The very conception of the Pacific Northwest as a region is contested; [it] encompasses numerous Indigenous territories that are not reflected in either the term Pacific Northwest or settler-colonial place names and borders.”

3. For a closer look at how the growth of craft beer drove an insatiable demand for PNW-grown hops, especially varietals like Cascade, see Hieronymus (2012).

4. While I attempted to solicit interviews from additional suppliers, it is important to note that there are fewer than a dozen suppliers in the Yakima Valley who oversee hop distribution (see “Hop Finder” on the website for the Hop Growers of America).

5. Examples of interview questions included: How did you get into this profession? How long have you been in this profession? What do you like about being a brewer (or your occupation)? How would you describe the size of your brewery (or your operations)? How would you rate your own knowledge of hops varieties, production, and distribution? Could you describe the steps you take from selecting your order to receiving the hops prior to making your beer (or steps in growing/processing/distributing hops)? Has this process changed much in the past 5 years? 10 years? Longer? How? Does it matter to you where your ingredients come from, and if so, why? What considerations do you consider when acquiring ingredients? Do you think that these things matter to your customers, i.e., the people consuming your beer? Why or why not? What is it about beer that attracted you to making it? Do you consult/utilize any resources (friends, books, websites, etc.) for helping to make decisions about what ingredients to use? What are these resources? How do you learn about what new varieties are available? How do you retain your recipes?

6. Industry insiders may counter such claims and suggest that it is craft beer’s overall “community-minded” ethic of sharing knowledge and resources that posed relatively few barriers to me as a researcher.

7. The Yakima Valley tourism website states that, “After the first mural was completed, a Mural Society was formed and the organization has completed more than 75 additional murals. On the first Saturday in June, the city hosts a ‘Mural-In-A-Day’ event, where artists gather to complete an entire wall-sized masterpiece in a day. Hundreds of people come to watch the paint dry.”

8. It is mostly private donors with some connection to the hops industry – i.e., hops farmers, agribusinesses such as farm equipment suppliers and distributors, banks, and insurance brokers – who provide the museum with funding, by sponsoring an annual golf benefit as well as through individual memberships.

9. A 2020 report in High Country News inveighed against the settler myth of “land-grant universities”, stating that “behind that myth lies a massive wealth transfer masquerading as a donation” facilitated through the Morrill Act of 1862 (Lee and Ahtone 2020).

10. One supplier noted that large breweries have the money to invest in the science of developing new varieties or improving varieties, whereas farmers do not have these resources.

11. Another supplier noted that mechanical pickers used by hop farmers during harvest can be prohibitively expensive – starting at $30,000 used and $180,000 new.

12. During the 2020 harvest season, the Yakima Valley had some of the highest rates of coronavirus infections in Washington State and a particularly hot and dry summer sparked devastating fires whose smoke destroyed much of the hop’s crop (McClain 2020). As Maya Montenegro de Wit (2020) elaborates: “As if on cue, agriculture in central Washington became ground zero of the state’s coronavirus crisis. Yakima County in June had the highest per capita rate of COVID-19 infections on the entire West Coast (JHU 2020), a prevalence that farmworker advocates directly linked to historical racism. ‘It’s almost like we’re someone’s sacrificial lamb in this pandemic,’ Rosalinda Guillén, executive director of Community to Community Development, a farmworker-based organization, told reporters (McClain 2020)”.

13. Still, to his point about the industry supporting charities, one brewery I visited regularly released a beer whose proceeds were directed to migrant-serving organizations.

14. One exception has been hop farmer Leon Loza Sr., profiled by the Yakima Herald in 2018, and who at the time was “believed to be the only Hispanic commercial hop farmer in the United States.” Loza Sr. migrated from the Mexican state of Jalisco at the age of 15 to work in the fields of the Yakima Valley, but was deported shortly thereafter. He successfully returned to the U.S., married, and received amnesty with the passage of IRCA in 1986. After the passing of his long-time employer, he acquired the 56-acre hop farm with a $250,000 loan, but only after several rejections by lenders who were openly discriminatory against him, attesting to the deep history of racial discrimination within U.S. agricultural institutions (Messer 2018; Minkoff-Zern 2019).

15. A 2018 report estimated over $400 million in tourism-related revenue and cited tourism as the fastest growing sector of the region’s economy (Talamo 2020).

16. Craft beer is made by craft brewers, defined by the Brewers Association as “small” (annual production equals 6 million barrels per year or less) and “independent” (less than 25% of the craft brewery is owned or controlled by a beverage alcohol industry member that is not itself a craft brewer.” https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics-and-data/craft-brewer-definition/

17. For a comprehensive history of the brewing industry in the Pacific Northwest, see Meier, G. 1991. Brewed in the Pacific Northwest: A History of Beer-Making in Oregon and Washington. Fjord Press.

18. I borrow Mays’ (2021) definition here of cultural appropriation: “the idea that a dominant group takes, at will, cultural markers from a powerless group, and appropriates them, in unacknowledged ways that ignore the historical roots of said thing and then make it seem brand new” (p. 136).

19. As stated on its website, Crafted for All is “a professional development platform that fosters inclusive, equitable, and just spaces and experiences in the craft beer sector.” The Brewers Association “is an organization of brewers, for brewers, and by brewers.” Consisting of “more than 5,300 U.S. brewery members and 46,000 members of the American Homebrewers Association” the organization engages in activities such as policy advocacy, issuing best practice guidance, fostering community among its members, monitoring the supply chain, and providing educational resources (organization website).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Megan A. Carney

Megan A. Carney is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona.