Book Description

While craft beer's placement within American society offers a plethora of specific and complex prospects in terms of the socioeconomic relationships between commodities provided to an industrialized culture, the economic competition between the macrobreweries and microbreweries of the beer industry is ultimately better for the consumer at the end of the day. Therefore, I intend to defend this thesis through an examination of movement's origin and development within American culture over the past three decades, encapsulated by a primary case study on craft beer in the state of Montana, with specific emphasis on the narrative of the Bozeman Brewing Company in Bozeman, Montana. In addition, I present the film Crafty as a visual companion to this written argument, with the ultimate intention of effectively communicating the thesis on multiple levels of textual representation. While the film itself seeks to dissect cultural inferences from the Montana case study in order to extrapolate norms applicable to the larger scale of the American craft beer movement, Crafty is meant to be the first installment of an ongoing series of programs that give credence to the individuality of each brewing company (both micros and macros). Therefore, Crafty should be viewed as a pilot episode of sorts; it exists as both a stand alone visual statement of the thesis and an introduction to something that is to be continued, something worthy of the continuing evolution of the craft beer and craft brewing companies in America. In addition, the intended episodic notion of Crafty will serve to punctuate the micro-narratives within the modern American craft beer movement because each brewery is the product of its own ongoing history that deserves recognition as a component of American culture.