Once upon a Beer Desert

Chapter 1 shows how the specific context of Las Vegas has stunted the growth of the local craft beer scene. The way that context is understood in this case is primarily through the city’s reputation and dominant imagery. The way that people outside of Las Vegas think about Las Vegas affects how people live inside of it. The city’s reputational constraints are exposed through a diagnosis of a condition that affects the way Las Vegas is often (mis)interpreted. I call this the Las Vegas Syndrome. Yet while this dis-ease is most evident on and emanating from the Strip, the Strip plays dual roles as foe and friend to craft beer drinkers.

Beauty in the Eyes of the Beer Holder

Scenes rely on individuals at various levels of their “experiential career.” Because scenes are publicly available and open and voluntarily joined and enacted because people are drawn to and thereby choose to appreciate their core object, they are necessarily home to individuals with varying levels of experience and knowledge. This type of diversity offers a necessary degree of dynamism to a scene. Chapter 6 shows the process by which aesthetic awakenings, aesthetic connoisseurship, and aesthetic entrepreneurship happen. All three are forms of socialization that require the acquisition and use of sensuous knowledge.

Introduction

This chapter introduces readers to Las Vegas and its craft beer scene. Definitions of “craft” are explored, along with key concepts that are used throughout the book, such as “scene” and “significant objects.”

#craftbeer

Chapter 5 shows how the performance of craft beer fans on Instagram, as well as other social media sites, is but one way to create new meanings out of received culture, thereby engendering some form of agency or control over the lived culture of everyday life, on- and offline. Creating and posting pics is a way to gain ownership over the product, a way of turning the objective object into a subjective experience to be shared with others. Instead of viewing the virtual scene as something independent from everyday life, it necessarily depends on, accentuates, and, in turn, reestablishes the importance of place in the physical material world. As such, the virtual scene becomes a conduit to and for both a specific local scene and the multitude of local scenes that make up the grand translocal scene through the ritual practices of “showing and sharing.”

Whose Beer? Whose City?

The concluding chapter moves from tragedy to triumph. During the time of writing, the worst mass shooting in US history happened in Las Vegas. It was an event the riveted the nation and shocked the city. It didn’t change the author’s analysis; instead, the way the local craft beer scene responded reinforced what he had found during his time empathetically engaged with the people, places, and things that define the scene. The last chapter ties the strings together and makes a final argument about the socially significant roles of scenes in cities as expressive, voluntary, and public entities.

Fussing over Status

Chapter 4 shows how negative ideological baggage can be passed down from the translocal to the local. This is evident in the varying ways that women are treated within the scene as well as the ways that the intoxication of craft can lead to regressive acts of materialism and conspicuous consumption. Such practices run counter to the egalitarian ethos espoused by craft beer scene participants.

Think Globally, Drink Locally

Aesthetic and affective affiliations that connect local scenes to each other create a grand translocal scene that depends on a widespread belief in translocalism—a strong valuation and valorization of other people’s local. This chapter addresses the phenomenon of translocalism and shows how it, counterintuitively, strengthens the local scene. Both translocal and local festivals are explored.

Not-So-Neon Terroir

Chapter 2 emphasizes the importance of both ongoing gatherings and the places that host and play a part in them. The chapter traverses the “aesthetic ecology” of the local Las Vegas craft beer scene, highlighting the key nodes that provide the stages the scene needs to express itself. These nodes are sprawled across the Las Vegas Valley, whereby each place needs to compete to draw people to it outside their respective immediate and nearby neighborhoods. As such, some places, even breweries themselves, have continued to follow the dominant logic of Las Vegas by including video poker atop the bars where they serve their locally and translocally brewed craft beers. This common practice, however, is changing, and some have banded together to help create—through the elevation of taste as an act of resistance—a new cultural logic and aesthetic demeanor for the city