It's-a Mea, Culpa

Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of your own actions.

A few weeks ago, the Campaign for Real Ale - better known as CAMRA - issued a statement to its members. The statement is similar to many others the industry has seen the past few years. Membership is declining. Finances are dwindling. Events are operating at a loss or are being canceled.

I was once a member of CAMRA, but I do not claim any expertise on its history, dynamics, or politics. I do get the idea that it’s similar to homebrew clubs I’ve been a part of - started decades ago by a group of mostly men with mostly men as members for the better part of those decades. These spaces tend to feel like old boys’ clubs, where new members are “welcomed” in the sense that they are allowed to pay money to join, attend meetings, and volunteer, but are never really welcomed into the inner circle of the club.

Here’s the thing that a lot of the leadership overlooks whilst rending their garments about why people don’t want to join their clubs: people can tell when they’re wanted and when they’re merely being tolerated or allowed in a space. After a while, those people, like me, may find themselves wondering why they are paying money to an organization that has never considered them and will never consider them.

Access without support is not opportunity.¹

Two fundamental reasons these organizations are seeing membership declining are that their base of members is usually quite literally dying off and the organization has shown itself to be performative at best towards welcoming members from historically excluded communities. Suddenly they find themselves, proverbial hats in hands, scuffing their shoes in the dirt, asking hey brother can you spare a dime to the people they have declined to support as members for many years.

The truly frustrating thing about this is that I know from my own volunteer experience that there have been people within these orgs advocating for change at fundamental levels. Advocating for understanding why people don’t want to join your organization and then taking meaningful action to address those barriers is necessary to appeal to new members. If you want new membership, you have to meet your members where they are, not try to shoehorn new members into old molds created by your heretofore homogenous membership. From my personal experience, trying to do this advocacy only to be met by opposition that amounted to “we’ve always done it this other way and it’s worked fine” was exhausting.

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I think a revival of social clubs, such as CAMRA and homebrew clubs, is possible. As a society, we are becoming increasingly more isolated from each other and often find ourselves relegated to three roles: employee, consumer, and household member. Loneliness has been considered an epidemic in the United States since 2023.²

The revival of social clubs may be one solution. Historically, social clubs began as spaces for higher class men to build social capital. In the United States, the emerging middle class found itself with some extra money and time. They couldn’t join the clubs of the wealthy, but they could form their own clubs with modest dues that afforded them an expanded social circle.

The craft beer industry initially grew out of the homebrew community. Homebrewing is an expensive and time-consuming hobby. To be a homebrewer often means you possess two key things:

• Disposable income that you can spend at your own discretion

• Free time to dedicate several hours to a hobby

Now think about who has historically had access to disposable income and autonomy over one’s schedule. Who can go to a meeting on the first Tuesday night of every month because someone else is taking care of the household? Who can spend a few hundred dollars on homebrewing equipment? Who can spend an entire mostly uninterrupted Saturday in the garage homebrewing?

The same people who could later borrow against their 401(k) or who had generational wealth to invest in opening craft breweries. The same people who could afford the time to create homebrew clubs. The same people who did not necessarily have to go into debt to get a secondary education that then allowed them to secure jobs with breweries.

The tension lies between keeping the old membership happy while substantively appealing to new membership. On the one hand, your older membership³ has kept the organization afloat. This older membership has been around for years, sometimes decades, sometimes since the organization was formed. The older membership oftentimes has all of the advantages I laid out above and, since they’re also typically the societal default, don’t realize or care that others do not have access to those kinds of privileges. Many times, this translates to the legacy membership having the kind of disposable income required to sustain social clubs. Many times, newcomers can bring the passion that may have faded from the older membership, but not the same privileges of time and disposable income.

What happens when these worlds collide is that the older members love that newer members want to get involved, because they are no longer interested in volunteering, and new members are excited about getting involved. What they soon learn, however, is that the organization may not actually be interested in changing to accommodate new members; rather, it is interested in having new volunteers run the organization the way it has always been run. I can tell you from personal experience that this, combined with the above point that people know when they’re not really welcomed, means that new members burn out really quickly. Some may opt out of the organization altogether or stop contributing their time and effort but still maintain membership for other reasons.

Similar to the “male loneliness epidemic,” I don’t feel sorry for these organizations when they have to announce that, despite refusing to fundamentally change in any way to attract new members, their membership has declined, and they can no longer maintain the programming they once did.

Like...yeah, what did you expect? That your existing members will live forever? That new members will be happy to be relegated to servants tasked to maintain an environment they aren’t really welcome in? You’re surprised that people don’t want to pay money to be treated like shit in their free time?

I really like what Boak & Bailey have to say about CAMRA’s announcement: it’s fine for organizations to cease to exist. Further, they point out that the social club exists to support its members, not to perpetuate its own existence.

There are people out there willing to do the work to make these organizations successful by being more inclusive. The issue is that the organizations have to let them. Or throw up road blocks, stymie initiatives and suggestions, discourage organizational change, and watch membership continue to decline. Because that’s how it’s always been done.

The next phase

At the beginning of this year, I launched my Aroma: Explore the Wheel webinar series. It was an idea that had been rolling around in my head for several months. Smell training is important for a lot of reasons beyond developing your aroma identification skills and descriptive vocabulary.

The first iteration of Aroma: Explore the Wheel was a really fun experience for me and hopefully a fun and educational one for the participants. By the end of the series, though, I was ready for it to be over, but I still wanted to explore what else I could do with Aroma: Explore the Wheel.

So now, coming to you around the holidays this year is Aroma: Explore the Wheel Beer Master Kit. The kit will contain 100 vials of commonly found aromas in beer. Rather than monthly webinars, there will be an accompanying Aroma: Explore the Wheel online course that is included with the purchase of the kit. The online course will contain on-demand webinars covering a variety of topics related to beer aroma and flavor as well as suggestions for smell training.

To learn more or to pre-order, you can check out this page.

And finally…

Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to these days:

1. Reading and watching Frances Tietje-Wang’s new Patreon Fermentable Sugar. Frances is a close friend, and I’m happy to see them begin sharing their insight and work on a public platform. You may have seen Frances’s writing in a variety of places as they are a prolific writer. Frances truly has a gift for connecting seemingly unrelated topics in fascinating ways as well as researching historical topics that you didn’t think you needed to know about until you read their writing. I highly recommend checking it out and considering supporting their work. The beer world needs more non-binary voices and viewpoints.

2. Traveling to Chicago for the Festival of Barrel-Aged Beers (FoBAB) at the beginning of next month. FoBAB is my absolute favorite beer festival and I’ve been invited to judge for the past few years, which was a dream of mine. It’s a good reminder to pause and reflect at the things you accomplish that past you would be so excited and proud to hear about.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237752117_Access_Without_Support_is_not_Opportunity

2. I do not want to discuss the “male loneliness epidemic.” Of course it’s a public problem when men are lonely. The overwhelming amount of information out there shows that it’s less of a “male loneliness” problem than it is a “some people now have power to hold men accountable for unacceptable behavior and now men have the sads that fewer people can be forced to put up with their unacceptable behavior” reality. The issue being that, unlike everyone else in the world, men have been socialized to make their internal issues external issues and that violence is a reasonable solution to alienation.

3. As in, people who have been members longer, not necessarily (but often) older in age.