It’s very possible we’ve reached peak beer. Even as consumption around the world has dipped a bit, America is deep in the throes of its love affair with craft beer and all its different sour, imperial, mega-hopped, varieties. There are over 5,000 craft breweries in the States, more than double the amount operating in 2011. But while most people are content to drink down whatever’s available at their local market or liquor store, a growing movement of beer fans is now using social media and under-the-table mailing practices to take their obsession to the next level.
Beer traders have presumably been around as long as craft brewing itself has. But an increase in the sheer volume of (good) beers on the market, combined with the appearance of so many spaces for enthusiasts to congregate online—in long-running forum-based communities like Beer Advocate and RateBeer, social networks like Reddit’s r/beertrade and Instagram’s @TheBottleTrade, and apps like Untappd—have ushered in a new age of beer trading.
The number of beers available to the average drinker have increased nearly fivefold, according to All About Beer magazine. And many of them are regional: craft breweries, especially the small ones, often have stringent distribution limits, based on geography, timing, and availability. Combine all that with the cultish followings that can so quickly develop around ultra-hyped beers, and you’ll understand why beer shopping for many has turned into a full-fledged collector’s hunt.
Thomas, a 24-year-old grad student from Los Angeles, grew up around and continues to frequent Monkish Brewing in Torrance, California. Though he has the ability to visit the brewery directly for releases, he’s in the minority; many of Monkish’s releases are only available at their brewery location via weekday queues, announced ahead of time on Instagram and updated by the brewery’s social media as the day’s release goes on. A quick scroll through any beer release post on their Instagram has posters commenting “ISO” (in search of) and “FT” (for trade), either of Monkish beers or of other beers, with users imploring others to DM them to set up swaps.
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“I started going to Monkish, and looking on social media, seeing all these beers that people trade,” Thomas drawled over the phone. “Maybe even farther back, with Goose Island Bourbon County. [Ed: It's #27 on Beer Advocate’s list of the 250 top-rated beers by its community.] I thought those were the craziest beers ever, and I looked online and saw people selling them for obscene amounts of money. But I didn’t really know trading until very recently, until basically looking on Instagram.”
Whether traders make connections on forums or social media, Thomas stresses the overall friendliness of the community: “I’ve just met people through trading and at breweries, where, they have all these cool beers, you talk to different people. Everyone’s extremely nice; it’s a super-friendly space, where you’ll trade with someone and they’ll send you something extra just to be friends and foster good relations for future trades.” It’s a practice that’s mirrored in other trading communities—a good but somewhat surprising parallel is the digital community of slime lovers.
Instagram has turned beer trading from a niche community to a full-fledged social media movement. Like many older-internet fan communities, the beer trading forums and web communities of yore pride themselves on their learning curve of entry and inside- baseball lingo; as one veteran trader shared to All About Beer, “If you’re new, they’re intimidating. People are ruthless. You post a deal and either get crickets, four people who want to work out a trade, or 93 people saying you’re an idiot.” But the advent of social media has brought beer trading to more and more people’s attention — including mine, though it was via a “horror story” about a brewery catching a fan offering its beers up for sale (technically illegal if you don’t have a liquor license) on Instagram before he’d even gotten them, and then canceling his order.
Even those most enthused about the beer trading’s adoption of social media, like Greg Avola, the 32-year-old co-founder of Untappd, acknowledges that while “trading gives people the opportunity to try new beers in other parts of the country that they would never have,” it also amplifies the “whale effect” (think Moby Dick), where “where people start hoarding beers to either cross-sell or mark it up—that's the concern I have.” Thomas also recognizes thats “the bad thing, or the hard thing about beer trading, is if you don’t live somewhere [where] there’s some brewery that’s making stuff that people really want, that people can only get there, then you don’t have any real power to trade with people. Certain breweries have everybody wanting their cans and bottles.” And the fervor of the beer trading community amplifies that even more.
But there’s a hiccup in the otherwise quaint idea of beer enthusiasts trading and collecting brews like alcoholic Pokémon cards; for those wishing to swap (or sell) rare beers across state lines but unable to meet in-person, mailing beers by the United States Postal Service is still a felony; other shipping companies like FedEx and UPS still technically aren’t allow to ship beers from someone without a liquor license.
Beer trading 101 guides will generally walk newbie traders through secret shipments, and most people like Thomas will always prefer to do trades in-person first. But beyond taking precautions with bubble wrap and cap-sealing tape, Thomas shares, “I’ve heard that if people have issues, usually people will give you, y’know, if something blows up on the way there, they’ll try to send you new beers or someone will try to help everyone else and rectify the situation.” Beer trading is still a corner of the internet where, it seems, people aren’t awful to each other.
It seems like a lot of work for a bounty that is, at its end, meant to go down your gullet and can be finished in a few minutes, if you’re feeling particularly thirsty. But the passion once -cultivated in gate-kept cloisters is now allowed to breathe and grow freely on the internet, and beer fans of all generations get to bask (and drink) in their spoils. Just as craft beer has become more accessible to non-obsessives through better draft offerings at bars, the thrill of the craft beer trade is no longer restricted to those who know the ins and outs of niche forums and their policies. And it’s a far more fulfilling use of Instagram than stalking your ex’s new boyfriend.
