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CraftBrands

at

IPlayn the summer of 2011, Milwaukee was one of

several cities visited by a small but impossible-to-miss

traveling carnival. The city’s Humboldt Park

was temporary home to a collection

of oddities that gave new meaning

to the word “eclectic”: fire eaters,

unclassifiable music acts, mechanical

wonders, tents featuring food and beer, and

every imaginable means of celebrating the bicycle (not

to mention many never before imagined).

This was the annual visit by New Belgium’s Tour de

Fat (which returned this past summer, this time at

Milwaukee’s lakefront). The signature event was the

bicycle parade, in which the costumed festival-goers

rode their own bikes through the streets wearing

“some sort of mix of English tweed, steampunk, or

just plain wacko,” as described by Colin, a 26-year-old

regular Tour de Fat attendee.

byMike

Kallenberger

90 The New Brewer S e p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 0 1 2 B r e w e r s A s s o c i a t i o n . o r g 91B r e w e r s A s s o c i a t i o n . o r g The New Brewer S e p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 0 1 2

The main purpose of Tour de Fat is to promote bicycling, which of course has some serious benefits, yet there’s nothing serious about the mood at the festival. A visit can remind you of watching a bunch of kids at recess, their imaginations set free. Colin remembers the “weird bike station: bikes with car tires for tires, a bike that ped-als itself in a circle, swing bikes, tall bikes, all sorts of contraptions that travel with the show” and a “slow bike race, where you get a 60s Schwinn with a coaster brake and you have to make it across the finish line last.”

“We see the bicycle as a tool that can bring about real social change,” said New Belgium CEO and co-founder Kim Jordan. “Riding a bike is also playful and fun. That duality makes for a simple yet compelling message. When I’m riding in the bike pa-rade at Tour de Fat, I feel incredibly grati-fied to see so many fellow travelers in pur-suit of a happy, playful, and meaningful way to make a statement about good living and good community—it absolutely blows my mind and can often bring me to tears.”

That playful spirit can be an important part of marketing craft beer to people in their 20s (as well as many in their 30s, 40s, and even 50s) today.

Another author, Christopher Noxon, found enough material about these types to be book-worthy. Rejuvenile discusses how and why “…this new band of grown-ups re-fuses to give up things they never stopped loving, or revels in things they were denied or never got around to as children.”

How common are “grups” (or, if you pre-fer, “rejuveniles”)? We don’t know the num-bers, but there might be a clue in an answer to a related question. A survey by psycholo-gist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett (reported in his book Emerging Adulthood) asked people, “Do you feel you have reached adulthood?” The options were “yes,” “no,” and “yes and no.” Among 18-25-year-olds, six in 10 chose “yes and no.” But 30 percent of those 26-35 and almost 10 percent of those over 35 also chose “yes and no.” These may or may not be grups per se, but it’s a telling statistic.

Some too-casual observers look at groups and see stunted adolescents who simply re-fuse to accept adult responsibilities, or suffer from even worse dysfunctions. But Arnett’s studies have found that the large majority do in fact embrace a wide array of responsi-bilities. And the work of several researchers, taken as a whole, seems to lead to an even more surprising conclusion: that these may

Since the doldrums of the late 1990s, one of the most important sources of growth for craft beer has been the growing enthusiasm of the adult Millennial generation (now age 21-33). There are several (often intercon-nected) reasons for the bond many Millen-nials seemingly feel for the category, but here’s one that hasn’t gotten much atten-tion: many of the brewers that emerged in the 90s (and since then) have injected more than a little playfulness into the collective attitude of craft beer culture.

If there was a “first wave” of craft brew-eries in the 1980s, the brands they created helped give the category as a whole a cer-tain personality: a belief in substance over style, rooted in a tradition that was in dan-ger of being lost, often tied to a place of ori-gin. (Think Sierra Nevada, Samuel Adams, Alaskan, or Deschutes.) It was an important and necessary step to give these new, unfa-miliar concoctions known as “microbrews” some credibility among beer drinkers who might otherwise not have known what to make of them.

But many of the rising brands of the 90s looked and acted a little differently. With the quality and substance of craft beer now firmly established, brewers like New Bel-

gium, Stone, Dogfish Head, and Three Floyds could build on that, helping show beer drinkers that there was no reason a great beer couldn’t be fun and playful as well.

That spirit of play is actually an important value among Millennials (as well as more than a few members of older generations). We’ll discuss why people who embrace this attitude may represent a good opportunity for marketing craft beer. But first let’s look into this mindset, including its real meaning, a little more deeply.

Adapting to ChangeAround 2006, at least two authors noted that a certain phenomenon was becom-ing prevalent enough to be worth writing about in detail. In a New York Times Maga-zine article, Adam Sternbergh described a type he labeled “grups” (a contraction of “grown-ups”): “[Grups are] not interested in putting away childish things… They are a generation or two of affluent, urban adults who are now happily sailing through their thirties and forties, and even fifties, clad in beat-up sneakers and cashmere hoodies, content that they can enjoy all the good parts of being a grown-up…with none of the bad parts…”

Dogfish Dash participants in Milton, Del. The 5K and 10K road race benefits the Delaware chapter of The Nature Conservancy.

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92 The New Brewer S e p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 0 1 2 B r e w e r s A s s o c i a t i o n . o r g

well be the people who will thrive in the rapidly changing world of the 21st century.

Few people need to be reminded of just how fast the world seems to change. But as psychiatry professor Arnold Beisser has noted, at some point in the 20th century a critical threshold was crossed: “…for the first time in history, the length of the indi-vidual life span is greater than the length of time necessary for major social and cultural change to take place.” As a result, “…man finds himself in a position where, rather than needing to adapt himself to an existing order, he must be able to adapt himself to a series of changing orders.”

In the past, by the time people became adults they’d typically developed a sense of what the world around them was all about, and had intuitively worked out a set of rules for how to succeed in that world. Then they spent the rest of their lives working from their internal “rule book,” which more of-ten than not was pretty similar to the rule book that had been used by their parents and grandparents.

In the world that’s emerging, that strat-egy just won’t work very well. People will need to hold on to the ability to grow and adapt, figuring out new rules as they go along, throughout their adult lives.

But as another researcher, Bruce Charlton, writes: “…mature adults have not evolved to manage these challenges.” For this rea-son “…a personality type characterized by prolonged youthfulness is advantageous…in modern life generally. …A child-like flex-ibility of attitudes, behaviors, and knowl-edge is probably adaptive in modern society because people need repeatedly to change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends… Since modern cul-tures favor cognitive flexibility, ‘immature’ people tend to thrive and succeed and now set the tone of contemporary life.”

Reimagining AdulthoodOf course, for our purposes “immature” shouldn’t be interpreted as “childish,” in the sense of being selfish, stubborn, or in-secure. As Sternbergh concludes, “It’s about reimagining adulthood as a period defined by promise, rather than compromise.”

Openness—to adaptability and growth, and new experiences in general—is a trait

Could he have been even more open to that message because he also felt he fit right in with the playful mood? “It wasn’t kitschy…people weren’t ‘acting,’ they were just being themselves, in crazy costume. I’m going back next year with a bike that has fatter tires.”

Mike Kallenberger is president of Tro-pos Brand Consulting, which he found-ed in 2010. Prior to that he spent over three decades at Miller Brewing Com-pany and MillerCoors, where he stud-ied brand strategies, beer drinkers, and consumer trends. n

that often gives someone a certain pre-disposition to drinking craft beer. And so what Noxon summarizes as a spirit of “play, make believe, and learning” will not only catch attention, it’s an easy way to signal “we have something in common” to poten-tial new drinkers.

Tour de Fat seems to achieve its ob-jectives, both serious and less so, at least based on feedback from Colin, the Millen-nial bicycle enthusiast. “I left with a re-newed confidence that people are actually embracing the bicycle as more than just a way to get from point A to B, but as a model for sustainability.”

“grups” are not

interested in

putting away

childish things

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