Is Beer the Most Distributist Product Ever?

Eh?

Okay, let's start off with a definition refresher, as for many folks the term "Distributist" is a mystery.

People generally believe that there's two economic systems, and only two, and anything else is just some shade of them. Those systems, most folks believe, are "Capitalism" and "Socialism".

Most folks are wrong.

There are other economic theories other than those, although those two have dominated for the last century and Capitalism has come to absolutely dominate in its various forms.  People like to point out that's because the "free market" wins for being the most efficient system, but ironically they very rarely note that none of the modern Capitalist states actually have a free market system as every single country that is Capitalist uses a model based on some variant of the corporate business form which requires state action. 

Yup.

So bold free marketeer, you are actually a bold state supported business enterprise proponent.

Now, I don't mean to maintain that this is good or bad, just that it is. And what it is, is this.  Since their introduction in the 1600s business organizations are dominated by corporations.  Corporations are treated at law as people, and their shareholders are immune from any finding of corporate liability.  That's massively different from partnerships where individual partners are liable for the acts of the partnership.  This favors the creation of large entities which frankly couldn't exist but for the corporate business form.  But make no mistake, the creation of corporations is, in and of itself, an instance of state action.  By recognizing corporations, the state is taking a state action and intervening in the economy.

That's right.

One of the Wyoming locals.

Anyhow, one of the things that corporations have done over the years and are still doing is causing consolidation in the market place.  The natural drive for all corporations is to become bigger, the biggest and then the only, with some exceptions (given that there are a lot of small corporations. . . indeed, they grossly outnumber large corporations).   This is the case with all sorts of products and all sorts of places where you buy them.

Take, for example, something we discussed just the other day and which is also the subject of one of the most popular post on this blog, grocery stores. 

Groceries were once all bought locally.  Indeed, if we went back, let's say, 200 years ago to 1819, we'd find that most people raised, slaughtered, hunted and fished for a fair amount of their yearly provisions. . . no matter what they were.  There were products, to be sure, but a lot of things you were just on your own for.  Products that you bought, however, had to be bought at a variety of stores.  If they were "dry goods", you went to a small locally owned store and bought them there.  Vegetables were sold by vendors who just sold those.  Meat was purchased from a butcher.

As we move forward over the 19th Century, we'd see some change in that.  Even as late as 1919 a lot of people, indeed most people, still bought their groceries at locally owned green grocers, butcher shops, etc., although the first grocery store, Piggly Wiggly, had come in just prior to that time and was expanding.

So what if you were a beer drinker?

Beer has been brewed in North America since Pre Colombian times.  The Mayflower Pilgrims may have dropped anchor when and where they did as they were out of beer (truly), but they didn't introduce it to North America.  At that time, brewing beer was an all go it your own type of deal, however.  In other words, people didn't go to the store and buy a six pack of their favorite local brew.  But by the early 1800s commercial breweries were popping up and one of them, Yuengling, which commenced brewing in 1829, is still in business.  Pretty amazing really.

At first, rather obviously, these were all local operations. But the development of rail car refrigeration changed all that, and a lot more with it.

Rail car refrigeration started before the Civil War and by the 1850s beef was being moved by refrigerated rail car.  You'll frequently hear that the large cattle drives of the post Civil War period were designed to drive cattle to rail heads, which is quite true, but why that mattered isn't' explored that much.  Beef was being transported by rail to packing houses that then shipped the processed beef by refrigerated rail car.

Beer, pretty obviously, can be shipped the same way.

Anheuser-Bush reefer.

And in fact it soon was.

Rail reefers meant that some breweries learned to take advantage of them and then began to ship their product as far as they could sell it.  Anheuser-Bush is one of the prime examples.  It shipped by rail and marketed across the country, sending out not only beer but thousands of illustrations of the Battle of the Little Big Horn after 1876 as part of its marketing program.  The age of modern marketing, which arrived with the Jordan automobile wasn't there yet, but it was arriving.  So, Custer meeting his end, probably worried and thirsty, sold Budweiser, rather than girls who could barely fit into their clothes.  That age was yet to arrive, but the big brewery had appeared.

But local breweries remained and thrived at the same time. There were zillions of them, even in the remote West in smaller towns and cities.

Advertisement for the Casper Brewing Company's Wyoming Light Lager.

And that's true of the very local.

In this locality, starting at some point fairly early on (maybe 1914), a brewery was founded and brewed beer prior to Prohibition.  I've dealt with this here on our blog before.  Prohibition shut the brewery down, of course, just as it did thousands of breweries across the United States.  Unlike many of them, however, it came back after Prohibition and seems to have lasted, with a couple of interruptions, until 1948.

The exceptional part of this story isn't that Casper Brewing Company ceased operations in 48, it's that it made it that long.  Prohibition was devastating to local brewing and most breweries in the U.S. didn't make it back out of Prohibition when it was lifted twelve years after it started.  And, over time, those that did tended to be absorbed by the larger breweries that came to dominate the market after Probation's repeal.  Looked at from the vantage point of perhaps the 1960s, a person would have predicted that fewer and fewer breweries would have existed over time.

But something else has happened.

I've dealt with this, as noted, before.  But something really remarkable on this topic is going on now.

If we looked back two years ago there would not have been a single brewery of any type in this small to medium sized city.  There had been a couple of start up attempts, but they all failed.

Now there are three.  And all three basically came up in the last year.

There's a fourth in nearby tiny Glenrock.

All of these are locally owned and operated outfits.  They vary in size, but one of the very best is one of the smallest. And that brewery, Skull Tree, is so local in its focus that its making an effort to buy its constituent elements for its products from independent farmers in the region.  I.e., not only do the folks who own the brewery work there and make the beer, they buy the products to make it from locals or near locals who are independent businessmen.

And its product is really good.

This might give us an insight into something.  In the new era, maybe brewing has things figured out better than other industries, in the new economy, in some ways.  Local outfits can, with the right product, thrive in competition with bigger entities, and even do better than them.  As noted in an article from last year, some local beers are commanding a real local following in towns around Wyoming.  Now, in one of the cities that had no local brewing, it's really taken off.  Something in this industry has caused younger innovative people to take advantage of markets and technologies in a way that few others have.  We'll look at some of those industries that haven't and wonder about them a bit.

But in the meantime, maybe we'll have a beer.