Vegas Brews by Michael Ian Borer

Author:Michael Ian Borer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press

I could unload my fridge and make a nice chunk of change. But I wouldn’t do that. Because I know that if I wanted something how I would feel paying four hundred dollars for a bottle of [Assassin] SR-71 [brewed by Toppling Goliath in Decorah, Iowa] and I know some guy went and stood in line for two hours and paid twenty dollars, and they only made a hundred bottles. It’s just not right. This isn’t about the money. Yeah, I want to try everything I can, but selling or paying that much money just isn’t cool.

After Dave and I spoke about this, I went home and looked up SR-71 on a few black market sales sites. Though I was shocked when he said four hundred, I was even more stunned by the handful of bottles for sale ranging from nine to eleven hundred dollars. For one bottle. Of beer.

Black market price gouging and the acquisition of overpriced beers are part of a larger status game that occurs inside and outside of the symbolic boundaries of the scene. One of the motivations for pursuing highly coveted rare beers is to increase one’s status by being able to say one has or has had this or that brew. One way of showing this status is through ticking, which is simply recording the beers one has tasted. What was once a game between a group of friends in England, led by Mick the Tick, who wanted to see how many beers listed in the Good Beer Guide he and his buddies could try and tick off, has now become a near ubiquitous practice at beer bars, festivals, and bottle shares.

Today’s tickers are equipped with smartphones with downloaded apps like Untappd. I’ve seen tickers peruse beer lists for new beers they haven’t tried. I’ve seen them scurry around barstools and barkeeps to snap a quick pic of a bottle or pour before the bottle moves on to someone else or the pour moves across their palate. I’ve seen grown men and women sitting four or five to a table, noses aimed at their phones rather than in the glasses holding the beverages they’ve sipped or are yet to imbibe.

The aesthetic experience of the beer shifts quickly from tasting to ticking, from direct contact to a mediated recording and therefore distanced involvement with it. The recording of the experience becomes the experience itself.

Mike Dominiak has seen all of this too, both at his brewery, Bad Beat, and at the other places that compose the “aesthetic ecology” of the Las Vegas craft beer scene.

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