Book Review: Michael Ian Borer, Vegas Brews: Craft Beer and the Birth of a Local Scene

Abstract

Cities are more than places to live, work, or mobilize political or social movements— though they are all of these things. That they are also host to myriad local scenes that infuse urban experience with opportunities for shared enjoyments has only become more evident since 2020 as access to them has been severely reduced due to public health restrictions on public sociability. If a 300-page book about craft beer and the birth of a local scene might have previously seemed gratuitous, witnessing so many streets stripped of the aura with which their scenes had infused them is a reminder of the value of serious scholarly investigation into the basis and dynamics of urban cultural life. Michael Ian Borer’s Vegas Brews: Craft Beer and the Birth of a Local Scene represents such an investigation. Borer offers a richly detailed, close ethnographic study of the emergence of the microbrew craft scene in Las Vegas, animated by a much bigger question: in a city where consumerism, alienation, indifference, and artifice predominate, can scenes thrive that evoke local authenticity and the “well-crafted life?” The stark contrast between the official narrative of Vegas and efforts to cultivate spaces infused by this counternarrative makes the book especially poignant. Vegas Brews shines most through synthesis and application of diverse, existing concepts to illuminate the inner workings of the Vegas craft beer scene. Most notably, Borer revives John Irwin’s woefully neglected 1977 book, Scenes, which developed a dramaturgical approach to studying local scenes unfolding among disco dancers, surfers, skiers, spiritualists, and hippies. Following Irwin, Borer highlights three key aspects: scenes are (1) expressive: they are used for direct gratification but also promote an ethos; (2) voluntary: people choose to participate at different degrees and in different ways; and (3) publicly available: knowledge about the scene—where it is happening, what activities it entails, what ethos it stands for—can be acquired by anybody who is willing to participate and learn about it. Much of Vegas Brews involves observations about how these principles operate on the ground as local scene-makers work to build and grow the craft beer scene in Vegas. While the stories themselves are vivid and give the reader that feeling of having “been there” characteristic of good ethnographic writing, in the course of the analysis Borer extends the concepts, often through creative combination with other related themes. For example, Borer links Irwin’s categories to an explanation of why scenes are fun, and to the concept of fun more generally. Part of the fun comes from the voluntary aspect, which makes participation an opportunity to play without fully or categorically being defined by group membership. The public character also means that involvement can be a process of discovery: moving from the periphery of the scene into the core means encountering diverse characters, such as “beer geeks,” bartenders, and distributors, as well as diverse places, as the scene spreads out in loosely affiliated venues. The movement of individuals in and out, as well as the diffusion of 1044764 CTYXXX10.1177/15356841211044764City & CommunityBook Reviews book-review2021