27 Comments

Commenting has been turned off for this post
Tom's avatar

I wanna put in a plug here for one of the virtues of midwestern culture: it seems like here in the midwest, we're better at getting enthusiastic about stuff without turning into insufferable snobs. So for instance, here in Cleveland, beer culture is pretty huge, with tons of very popular local breweries all over the place. But everyone at these breweries is, pretty much universally, helpful and excited to show people new beers they might like (and are happy helping beer newbies get started). And yeah, I'm sure there are snobs floating around, but most of the beer guys I know are perfectly happy to drink a PBR or even a white claw if that's what's available.

So my hot take, I guess, is that snobbery doesn't necessarily have to be correlated with enthusiasm and knowledge. I think snobbery is really it's own distinct cultural phenomenon that infects whatever it touches. Beer or coffee enthusiasm doesn't turn people into snobs, but snobby people are happy to weaponize whatever interests are available to grab on to.

Expand full comment
Jeff Rigsby's avatar

I'm going to put in a plug here for Jimmy Carter, who legalized home brewing of beer and helped launch the craftbrew trend. In this particular case it wasn't just the internet.

James Fallows published an overstated take on this in the Atlantic, but since he had to walk it back slightly I'll link to the correction and not the original:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/08/jimmy-carter-not-the-king-of-beers-updated/61599/

Expand full comment
25 more comments...

No posts