Tapping into Sustainability: How Local Craft Breweries Foster an Ethic of Sustainability through Community Building and Development of Placed Based Identity

The demand for local products has grown dramatically over the past two decades. Over the same period, microbreweries that advertise their localism have expanded in popularity. Of the 731 microbreweries that opened nationally in 2017, three launched in Rice County, MN: Chapel Brewing, Imminent Brewing, and Tanzenwald Brewing Company. In this case study, we explore the motivations of brewers and brewery customers for creating and consuming local beer at these three breweries. By using a mixed methods approach that includes surveys, interviews, ethnographic observations, and website analysis, we find that, as indicated by the literature on alternative food movements, local beer producers and consumers are motivated by notions of economic justice, high-quality goods, environmental responsibility, and sense of place. We found high-quality goods and sense of place to be the most important motivators. In addition, we identify three paradoxes that problematize the terms “local” and “sustainable”. First, local breweries can only exist because of the globalized industry that provides nonlocal ingredients and equipment. Second, sustainability both increases and decreases based on the size of the business and the type of sustainability considered. Third, brewery efforts to build community produce spaces that are homogenous in terms of class and race, perhaps inadvertently facilitating further division in an already highly segregated county. Through recognizing these paradoxes, we establish a need to expand conceptions of sustainability to include a socio-environmental dimension in order to promote a more realistic and inclusive environmentalism