A Review of Hopped Up, How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity

About ten years ago, when I arrived at the Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery in the mountain town of Orizaba, Veracruz, in Mexico, I was excited that the administrator I’d spoken with earlier had arranged a private tour for me. Founded in 1896, the Moctezuma Brewery was saved from bankruptcy when it was bought out by Mexico’s behemoth Cuauhtémoc Brewery in 1985. It is best known globally for its Dos Equis amber lager and for Sol, the light, golden, pilsner-style beer now sold in over 70 countries around the world. On that day, the guide and I started in the gallery depicting the company’s history before moving onto a small room where a team of scientists, ensconced behind a glass wall, digitally monitored the mash tuns—large metal casks— where the fermenting wort burbled.

After a few more stops, we left the building and strolled across an interior plaza on our way to the automated bottling and packaging production lines. As we chatted, I looked up at the exterior wall of the fermentation building (where I was not allowed), emblazoned with both the striking green and red symbol of the Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery and the well-known logo for Heineken. Knowing that in 2010, FEMSA, the parent company of the Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery, had sold the brewing interest to Heineken in exchange for a 20 percent share of the large Dutch-based company, I said to the guide, “Así es, Heineken ahora es dueño de Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma.” The guide quickly turned to put me right, stating, “No, somos socios.”

Hopped Up, How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity by Jeffrey M. Pilcher (Oxford University Press, 2024, 341 pages).

Unlike some commodity studies and various histories of beer, there are no heroes or villains in this story (except perhaps in the craft brewing sector, but more on that below). Pilcher is not beholden to anything or anyone, including nostalgia, ideas about authenticity and purity, or prescriptive theories or historiographies. Rather, he boundlessly explores the shifting meanings and forms of beer styles as brewing techniques, ideas, inputs and people created and traversed global networks of trade, skill and taste across many millennia. As he argues, pilsner was not only a force for globalization, but also a product of it.

Some parts of brewing history are well-trod territory, and elements of them appear in Pilcher’s analysis as well. Hopped Up stands apart, however, for exploring how the deep history and interconnectedness of diverse fermented beverages around the world contributed to the creation of pilsner as a global commodity. The book follows a linear timeline, but breaks wide open geographically, defying the tightly packaged, narrowly framed origin stories in some histories of beer. Pilcher connects these diverse global stories by showing their shared roots in social transformations like industrial capitalism, commodification and globalization that determined the mobilities and exchanges that shaped global brewing. Of note, some of the terminology assumes knowledge that may be beyond the casual reader.

This is a big story. Chapter one provides an overview of pre-capitalist drinking cultures and fermented beverages around the world. From maize beer in the Andes to the millet-, rice- and legume-beers of China, brewers incorporated a wide range of local grains and additives to brew their drinks. Chapter two brings the reader into the medieval era, when the arrival of hops sparked a golden age of new brewing technologies that transformed beer into a commodity that could travel further than ever before. Industrialization in early modern Germany and England soon followed, leading not only to the rise of industrial lagers, but also to the growing mobility of people, technologies, capital and ideas that reshaped the production and trade of local fermented beverages such as pulque in Mexico and sake in Japan. Pilcher casts this as a globalizing process, but the lens is firmly Western. That’s to be expected; Hopped Up is telling the history of how pilsner came to dominate global markets and palates. But the connections of examples beyond Europe and the United States to the rise of pilsner could be more explicitly delineated.

Hopped Up next surveys the new technologies, often-imagined geographies, and mobilities of goods, inputs, skill, people and ideas across Europe that led to the development of pilsner as a commodity. Next, chapter four provides a fascinating exploration of how European style beers followed the global flows of imperial commerce and competition. Once European migrant brewers displaced European exporters, Pilcher delves into how they competed with brewers of local fermented beverages, the latter of whom clung stubbornly to domestic brewing traditions despite regulations, commercial flows, consumer demand and colonists’ racist fears turning against them.

The next chapters trace the massive, albeit uneven concentration of the brewing industry around the world in the 20th century. Consolidations facilitated by more efficient technologies and transportation, as well as by mass marketing that drew heavily from nationalist projects, led to an explosion of large-scale industrial brewers who drowned regionally distinct lagers in a pool of pilsners. This process was intense in Europe, but due to that region’s deep and diverse brewing history, concentration there was tame compared to the Americas and China. Chapter five’s most trenchant analysis examines how local racial projects played a critical role in industry concentration. According to Pilcher, as the nation became the primary political unit, beer was pressed into service as an expression of shared identities and economic growth that consolidated the move to pale lagers and drove alternatives out of business. Chapter six extends this storyline, examining the mergers and managerial revolution that reshaped the structure of the industry in the latter half of the 20th century. By focusing on non-European contexts, this chapter shows how corporate raiders created multinational conglomerates that placed profit over product quality. First advertising managers and then investment bankers pushed brewing professionals aside in their rush to export “exotic” beers from places like Jamaica and South Africa for consumption by upwardly mobile consumers in Europe and the United States. Modern marketing may have affixed labels of authenticity or tradition to many of these beers as they hit shelves around the world, but these concepts only held salience due to beer’s commodification.

One might assume that Pilcher would save the bulk of his criticism for these global raiders, but he instead reserves his sharpest critiques for craft brewers, especially in the United States and Europe. While lauding their innovation and enthusiasm for reinvigorating distinct beer cultures in the face of conglomerates like AB-InBev and Carlsberg, he questions their claims to be leading a revolution. For example, he notes that while craft brewers promote rugged individualism, they rely on the same global technologies and supply chains as the big brewers, and have formed parallel knowledge networks and professional organizations. Despite their different messaging, he contends that their IPAs and sours are capitalist commodities just like the mass-produced beers they revile. Pilcher similarly criticizes their self-righteousness, arguing that their sociabilities, invented language of connoisseurship, and workplace practices are rooted in white-male exclusivity that has made the craft beer world a difficult space for non-male and non-white brewers. Perhaps no better or worse than the conglomerates, his ire arises from what he sees as the movement’s specious claims to moral authority, which is belied by its misogyny and shady labor practices.

Because Hopped Up covers so much historical territory, I occasionally wished for a bit more depth. Nevertheless, it is a marvelous journey through the story of one of the world’s most iconic beverages written by one of the world’s most prominent scholars of food and drink. And it is a story that continues. In 2023, FEMSA divested itself of its shares in Heineken, selling them back to the conglomerate for over $3.5 billion. Though wholly foreign-owned, Sol continues its ascent as one of Mexico’s fastest growing beers. First brewed in 1899 in the mountains of Veracruz, millennials in the United States now drive its foreign sales, drawn to the beer by its recent “Taste the Sun” campaign. Surely brewers in 1840s Plzen had no idea that their newly invented beer would someday morph into a pilsner-style brew with ownership in Europe, markets in Asia and Africa, and an identity tied not to Bohemian hops, but to the Mexican sun.

Susan Gauss is a historian and author of Made in Mexico, Regions, Nation and the State in the Rise of Mexican Industrialism, 1920s-1940s (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). She is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her current research focuses on Mexico’s brewing industry. She was a 2011-12 David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Visiting Scholar.

A Review of The Brazil Chronicles

En los 80s