By the fall of 2010, the hipster was, apparently, dead. Culture tsar n+1 magazine said so, as did American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, whose clothing line’s aesthetic of rec-room soft porn had become the de facto hipster vibe. Meanwhile, snarky pop culture site Gawker had already declared an equally acerbic new nickname to denote young, urban coolness: fauxhemian, which handily outflanked the runner up: doucheoisie.
Of course, the term hipster would endure for years after the zeitgeist proclaimed the subculture dead, mainly to denote the consumer choices that came to represent it: fixed-gear bikes, checked shirts, American Spirit cigarettes, and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, to name a few.
So-called hipster beer might have endured the longest — surfacing in lifestyle media deep into the 20-teens, possibly because aging hipster staff writers enjoyed forecasting the next one. Would High Life finally dethrone PBR as the cool kids’ light lager of choice, or would ascendent regional darling Narragansett take up the hipster crown (beanie)? And what about 2017’s quirky lead candidate, Montucky Cold Snacks?
By 2021, a Reddit thread on this very topic went cold, leaving me to wonder whether hipster beer had finally died or evolved into something else.
“I personally think hipster beer did kind of die with the hipster,” says Kate Bernot, beverage reporter and director of the North American Guild of Beer Writers. “Hipster was of a time and place: Brooklyn in the early 2000s. That is over; ergo hipster beer is over. However, if any part of it lives on, it’s in the more niche, lifestyle beer brands that are flourishing now.”
One could plausibly argue that hipster beer was the original “lifestyle” beer — a self-consciously ironic antidote to craft beer’s pretentiousness, maybe, or a bit of working-class cosplay from well-heeled youth who could afford to drink something “better.” Then again, it might simply have represented whatever cheap, domestic light lager young, hot people could afford in bars 20 years ago — be it PBR, Stroh’s, Miller High Life or Coors Banquet.
I wondered which interpretation was intended when I was accused of drinking hipster beer while cracking a can of Cold Snacks a few months ago. Or what we should call the slew of “heritage” light lagers uncannily similar to Old Style and PBR that craft brewers have released in recent months, like Modist Brewing Co.’s Dortmunder Style Lager (which suspiciously resembles Old Style) or Destihl Brewery’s Destihl Lite, the undeniably bland lager with the “Boycott Bland” tagline. Maybe those of us aging out in an era of commodified coolness while still clinging to our vintage tallboy cans are the only ones who care. Fortunately, there’s now a lifestyle beer for us, and pretty much everyone else.
What Even Is a Hipster?
We can’t write hipster beer’s autopsy report without first wading into the nebulous waters of defining the hipster. The term was first coined in the 1940s to describe Black jazz aficionados, then later co-opted by Norman Mailer to describe decidedly white “American existentialists.”
Across the decades, various monikers have been deployed to denote a privileged creative (and creative-adjacent) class with a penchant for rebelling against the mainstream: artists, bohemians, scenesters. If you’re my sister, a 40-something once-hipster formed by the early 2000s punk and post-punk music scenes in Wicker Park, Chicago, the term hipster evolved out of scenester, which denoted the social circles that coalesced around local music venues. If you’re Williamsburg writer Robert Lanham, writing in the 2003 book “The Hipster Handbook,” hipsters were young people with “mop-top haircuts, swinging retro pocketbooks, talking on cell phones, smoking European cigarettes.”
Hipsterism has long been accused of being a purely aesthetic subculture — “reflective of a young, urban, aesthetically conscious lifestyle,” Bernot says. “Unlike youth culture movements before it, it had no grand ideology like the hippies who were antiwar and punks who were anti-capitalist. It was like, I don’t know, vibes.”
“In larger manifestations, in private as well as on the street, contemporary hipsterism has been defined by an obsessive interest in the conflict between knowingness and naïveté, guilty self-awareness and absolved self-absorption.”
There was a realness to being an intellectual slouching around the “indie sleaze” music scenes or knocking back PBRs at bike messenger dives while discussing Dave Eggers essays. Stylish 20-somethings with liberal arts degrees, lots of debt, and shrinking viable career options felt a nagging sense of nihilism. Gentrifying urban neighborhoods offered intellectually stimulating playgrounds in the meantime — and, unintentionally, provided a fertile habitat for late-capitalist commerce, as sociologist Richard Lloyd wrote in “Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Post-Industrial City,” which traced Wicker Park’s hipster scene in the ‘90s. Those seen as authentically hip and genuinely resisting the corporate mainstream often end up conforming pretty nicely to capitalism’s profit-making imperative in their working lives, Lloyd argued.
There was a queasy sense of navel gazing at the heart of it all. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to utter the word aloud without scorn. The Onion articulated it best in 2006 when it ran the headline, “Two Hipsters Angrily Call Each Other ‘Hipster.’”
“In larger manifestations, in private as well as on the street, contemporary hipsterism has been defined by an obsessive interest in the conflict between knowingness and naïveté, guilty self-awareness and absolved self-absorption,” wrote Mark Greif in “What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation,” published in n+1 in 2010.
From Rock Bottom to Hipster Heaven
So what’s a hipster to drink? The story of how a macro lager like PBR came to represent the subculture in the early 2000s is — fittingly — one of savvy marketing by the brand, which was all but dead in 2001. After more than two decades in decline, Pabst had bottomed out. The lone bright spot was hundreds of cases and dozens of kegs that a small handful of Portland, Ore., bars were inexplicably tearing through each week, which prompted the company to send then-PBR marketer Neal Stewart to investigate.
Owing to a series of corporate plot twists, PBR had become the $1 can of choice at a few joints located a stone’s throw from liberal arts university Reed College. Stewart soon realized that the lager had amassed a cult following among college students and mustachioed bike messengers with PBR thigh tattoos. When he returned to Pabst’s headquarters in San Antonio, he pitched the idea of sponsoring a bike messenger race in Portland. And thus began PBR’s hipster reign.
“Hipster beer also existed as the antidote of craft cocktail and craft beer pretentiousness. I think that’s why it stuck around in bars and in drink media, because it needed to be that foil.”
Mirroring the creatively inclined origin point of hipsterism from which the movement sprouted, PBR might’ve initially caught on among the broke, young creative set, but it was rapidly adopted as the ironic choice by those who bought their flannels at Urban Outfitters and could perhaps afford to drink something “better,” says Bernot.
“When a Mexican-American grandfather drinks a Tecate, that’s not a hipster beer, right?” she says. “But it is a hipster beer when a 20-something creative director drinks it at a dive bar — why? It’s like this idea that’s happening culturally right now, with the valorization of Americana and ‘Yellowstone‘. There’s veneration of some hard-working past, when really we’re all just marketing managers for internet startups.”
It’s possible that some of PBR’s success had to do with actual enjoyment for the value, too.
“If I’m thinking about what made PBR explode, it’s that intersection of economics and flavor,” says Karl Klockars, author of “Beer Lover’s Chicago” and co-founder of craft beer review site Guys Drinking Beer. “You could get that beer for cheaper and it tasted better.”
Klockars recalls wandering around Chicago’s North Side in and out of bars in the early 2000s with a guy he’d met from the U.K., seeing the prevailing Bud and Miller Lite taps everywhere.
“We ended up someplace and I ordered a PBR, and he said, ‘This is the first beer I’ve had where I can actually taste something,’” Klockars says. “After coffee culture came around, people were rediscovering other flavors that maybe had disappeared. If Miller Lite and Bud Light are Folgers, it’s not quite a one-on-one to say PBR was Starbucks, but you know what I mean.”
Over time, different macro beers took turns jockeying for hipster reign, which might’ve varied by city — St. Paul, Minnesota-born Hamm’s, Detroit’s Stroh’s, Coors Banquet in the stubby medicine bottle, Tecate tallboy cans. Before too long another once-flagging brand, Miller High Life, was being touted as the de facto hipster beer, thanks in part to more savvy advertising that capitalized on post-industrial, handicraft fetishism.
Craft beer, a.k.a. the third-wave coffee of the beer world, could never have been hipster beer, however. Not only did it cost too much, but it embodied the sort of pretentiousness that the counterculture professed to loathe, per Bernot.
“Hipster beer also existed as the antidote of craft cocktail and craft beer pretentiousness,” she says. “I think that’s why it stuck around in bars and in drink media, because it needed to be that foil.”
The Death of (Faux) Counterculture?
Inevitably, as said hipsters aged — their tastes evolved and their beards fuller — they started going for the stuff they actually liked, which now included the pricier craft IPAs and lagers that do the category justice. Brands were quick to lean into the nostalgia for what used to be hipster beer, of course. Enter Lupulin Brewing’s Lupulin Light (“tastes like beer”); Wax Wings Brewing’s easy-drinking Kalamazoo Lager; Hagard Barrel Brewing’s Schlapp’s (“Nothing hits like a Schlapp’s … And how!”); and Pigeon Hill Brewing’s revival of Lake State Lager. Each beer’s branding resembles a macro once-hipster beer; each punchily self-describes as one regular beer. Klockars has dubbed 2024 “the year that craft lagers invade macro beer’s territory” — though, like declaring the next It neighborhood or the next kale — this could be wishful thinking from the craft beer camp.
Some of this forecasting reasonably owes to the existential crisis facing craft and big beer alike, meaning brewing a local IPA isn’t enough to stay viable anymore. “Brewers have tank space they’re not using, which leads to brewing lagers because they take more time,” Klockars says.
Meanwhile, the macro lagers once known as hipster beer have now become “dad beers,” not just deliberately uncool but arguably today’s most mainstream brews — transcending age, class, and geographic divides. The younger, hotter generation may even call them vintage, in the vein of buying a used sweatshirt at a thrift store as “a signifier of a different time,” Klockars says. Whether they’re poised for a full-on invasion remains to be seen.
But surely there must be some equivalent younger generations are self-consciously drinking in this post-hipster-beer, post-ironic era of instant gratification and commodified coolness. What should we call it — lifestyle beer? Inscrutable beer?
Bernot wonders if Montucky Cold Snacks is indeed the closest modern counterpart to hipster beer. She’s always described the pale lager to people as, “what if PBR gave a little more of a damn?” — not just in regards to taste and stylishly ostentatious merch but via outward support of progressive political and cultural agendas. Then again, Montucky’s a totally mainstream brand at this point, too; the world’s largest wine company, Gallo, bought a stake in it earlier this year.
It’s more likely that we’ve reached a point in the alcohol industry where there’s just not a need for hipster or inscrutable beer — “where it’s more about drinking what you like,” Bernot says. It’s the drinking equivalent of a 20-something wearing a fast-fashion Nirvana T-shirt simply because they like how it looks.
We don’t have to waste any more fake-energy, fake-hating craft beer nerds or suspender-donning mixologists. Craft beer has long since infiltrated the mall and movie theaters; and craft cocktails even come in cans. In fact, ready-to-drink beverage is so fractured into niches suiting every lifestyle and dietary whim, and the industry is so dizzyingly consolidated, that maybe cheap beer is, post-ironically, just cheap beer again. Imagine that.
