Craft Obsession: The Social Rhetorics of Beer by Jeff Rice (review)

When a presidential tweet can promote, mis-state, amplify, or contradict an important policy position, scholars of public rhetoric may be tempted to fıt social media forms into familiar frameworks, if only to address our strange new networked world. In Craft Obsession: The Social Rhetorics of Beer, Jeff Rice invites readers to resist that temptation by giving in to other frameworks. The foremost of these is beer—the book is, above all, an exploration of Rice's complex affective relationship with craft beer. Although that may sound, as Rice acknowledges, "self-indulgent" (177), the exploration enables him to address the small stories, instant pleasures, and acts of sharing that constitute our attachments to social media. By forestalling our automatic political narratives and typical modes of explanation, Rice has crafted a compelling diagram of the functions of social media.

Rice begins by exploring social media's most notable features: the "blog posts, status updates, tweets, images, and feed headlines that, while interactive, are also short, brief encounters with a given moment" (6). In chapters 1 and 2, Rice focuses on these small stories and anecdotes for two reasons. First, they serve as a "supposedly inconsequential" counterweight to the grand narratives, allowing Rice to focus on the details of the fragmented narratives without resolving them into preexisting frameworks (25). In the introduction and chapter 1, Rice tells his own small stories: an unexpected "parental beer tale" of taking his daughter to brewpubs, or the typical story told by beer drinkers of their fırst beer, in Rice's case, sharing a beer with his father. Rice acknowledges that it is a very common fırst beer story (it is my own as well). His second reason for focusing on small stories is the commonality, or repetition, that Rice refers to as contagion. In chapter 2, Rice argues that repeated details of small stories aggregate into identities. Cycling through a seemingly random series of fragments on the beermakers' Zoigl star, the Star of David, a perhaps family-connected Jewish bootlegger, and other anecdotes, Rice suggests that small stories help us discern and make "patterns (bursts) that construct a larger identity" (59).

Rice accepts that some of his aggregated stories never resolve themselves into larger academic aims. Rather, they invite readers to experience their own contagions and to construct their own arrangements or patterns. In chapter 3, Rice discusses tropes of authenticity in craft beer rhetorics. The target is a foundational taxonomy, or the way traditional understandings of terroir ground our classifıcation systems of beer and wine in soil or a region. Instead, Rice proposes a networked terroir, rejecting "a pseudolegal taxonomy (legal appellation) because in this framework there is no room for me and my personal ordering" (89). Rice continues this discussion in chapter 4, which explores the role of assumptions in our aggregation schemes. Social media, by functioning as what McLuhan would call a cool medium, invites its users to craft their own aggregations and clusterings to order their own networks. If craft beer has seen remarkable success alongside social media, Rice suggests, it may be because crafts have been untethered from the restraints of territorial authenticity, entering into other sorts of (user-ordered) networks.

Rice's swerve away from authenticity may seem counterintuitive given the importance of "the local" in craft discourse and, indeed, how one defınes craft within the craft beer industry. In chapter 5, Rice addresses this question of defınition while demonstrating and extending the theoretical networks that compose Craft Obsessions. Specifıcally, Rice draws on Latour to rethink craft beer not as an object, but as the network of connections that comprise the object and its circulation: "the places of consumption, distribution, drinkers, online discussion, ingredients, shipping issues, beer tastings, consumption itself, retail, hype, relationships among craft brewers, marketing, and so on" (145). However, Rice departs from Latour's suggestion that "networks are not made" (145). Rather, his own writing is an...