Planet Taco: The Global History of Mexican Food (2012), The Oxford Handbook of Food History (2012), and Food in World History.
Pilcher applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Hopped Up at the Oxford University Press website.substitution of domestically brewed beers for imported German brands to be a patriotic duty. By contrast, German migrants drove the expansion of the Russian beer industry, replacing the former predominance of English ales and dark native beers with Munich and Pilsner-style lagers. Pasteurized beer shipped from Moscow and St. Petersburg competed for the Siberian trade with German brewers who settled in Irkutsk and Blagoveshchensk. Beer also trickled through the Balkans, courtesy of Hungarian brewers, who learned their trade in Austria, and of Serbians, who exported it to Macedonia and Salonica.Hopped Up passes the Page 99 Test. The book is about the commodification and global spread of lager beer. Page 99 falls in chapter 3, called “Inventing Pilsner,” about the clear, light, sparkling beer from the Bohemian town of Pilsen that has become a global standard, from Budweiser to Tsingtao. Just as migrations (Germans settling in Siberia, as they had in St. Louis) and stepwise “trickle trade” carried lager beer to Eastern Europe, it also spread through Europe’s global empires as both imperial settlers and colonized peoples alike sought out this symbol of modernity.
Industrial modernity transformed the beer drinking cultures of Europe and North America, even though marketing was often inspired by rural nostalgia. Despite the efforts of Central European brewers to advertise the high quality of their products, over the long run consumers were generally unwilling to pay more for imported goods when they could buy a similar product brewed locally. In Amsterdam, for example, Bavarian beer had cost four cents more per liter than domestic beers in the 1880s but a decade later the difference had fallen to only one cent. Likewise in the United States, although imported Bohemian beer sold for double the price of local beers about 1880, the premium also declined over time. Brewers and consumers alike thus questioned the meaning and value of genuine beers from cities such as Munich and Pilsen.
A Golden Age?
Parisians flocked to drink a bock with the dapper young Anton Dreher at the Universal Exposition of 1867, but the popularity of his amber Vienna lager was already being challenged by its golden Bohemian rival. Even before the fair opened in Paris, Austrian official J. John observed: “In the struggle between light and brown beer, it appears that the light is gaining more followers day by day.” Just six years later, when the Austrian capital hosted its own World’s Fair, the Bayerische Bierbrauer reported that Pilsner was “preferred to the famous Viennese beers, even in Vienna.” But Pilsner spread not only as a commodity in trade, but also as a recipe made by brewers far beyond its Bohemian home town. As it traveled, the meanings of the style continued to change, in part because improved technology and consumer preferences drove a convergence of other beers toward the light, clear qualities of Pilsner. Brewers in Pilsen responded to this competition by seeking legal protection for their trade name, but they faced an uphill battle defending their claims in distant courts.
The middle paragraph summarizes a section on the transformation of drinking cultures during the industrial era. The urban middle classes went to bucolic beer gardens for leisure while the working classes visited taverns and pubs to purchase beer that they might formerly have brewed at home on the farm. The section particularly questions the meanings of genuine Pilsner when brewers elsewhere could use the same name to sell a similar beer at a cheaper price. There is still a global market for premium brands, but most beer drinkers today purchase local beers, even though the breweries are often owned by giant conglomerates such as AB Inbev.
The final paragraph begins the chapter’s concluding section on the late-nineteenth-century triumph in Europe of golden Pilsners over dark Munich lagers and amber Vienna lagers. Despite the popularity of Pilsner, local variety persisted. These days, the co-existence of Bud Light and craft beer illustrate the power of capitalist market segmentation to sell a beer for every taste and social position. Hopped Up uses beer to demonstrate how commodities have pervaded modern life on a global scale.
--Marshal Zeringue
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