Hipster beer is dead. Long live lifestyle beer.

By fall 2010, the hipster was apparently dead. Culture kingpin n+1 magazine said so, as did American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, whose clothing line’s rec-room soft-porn aesthetic had become the de facto hipster vibe. Meanwhile, tongue-in-cheek pop culture site Gawker had already unveiled an equally biting new nickname for young, urban cool: “fauxhemian,” which handily beat out the runner-up, “doucheoisie.”

Of course, the term hipster continued to be used to describe the consumer choices that typified this subculture – primarily fixed gear bicycles, plaid shirts, American Spirit cigarettes, and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer – for years after the zeitgeist had declared the subculture’s demise.

So-called hipster beers may be the ones that have endured the longest, making their way into lifestyle media into the late 20s. Perhaps it’s because aging hipster staff writers have fun guessing what’s next. Will High Life finally dethrone PBR as the cool kids’ favorite light lager, or will Narragansett, a regional favorite on the rise, take the hipster throne (and the beanie)? And what about 2017’s oddball favorite, Montucky Cold Snack?

By 2021, Reddit threads on the topic had gone cold, leaving many to wonder if hipster beer had finally died out or evolved into something else.

“I personally believe hipster beer is dead along with the hipster,” says Kate Barnott, beverage reporter and board member of the North American Beer Writers Association. “Hipsters were a product of a time and place: early 2000s Brooklyn. That’s gone, and so is hipster beer. But if any hipster beer remains, it’s the niche lifestyle beer brands that are thriving right now.”

Hipster beer could plausibly be argued to have been the original “lifestyle” beer. Perhaps it was a self-consciously ironic antidote to the pretentiousness of craft beer, or perhaps it was a working-class cosplay by well-off young people who could afford something “better.” Or perhaps hipster beer simply represented the cheap domestic light lagers that young, hot guys could buy at the bar 20 years ago: PBR, Straw’s, Miller High Life, Coors Banquet, etc.

I wondered what interpretation was intended a few months ago when I was accused of drinking hipster beer while opening a can of Cold Snacks. Or what to make of the string of “heritage” light lagers that craft breweries have released in recent months that look eerily similar to Old Style and PBR, such as Modist Brewing Co.’s Dortmunder Style Lager (which looks suspiciously like Old Style) and Destill Brewery’s Destill Light (an undeniably bland lager with the tagline “Boycott Bland”). Perhaps only those of us who hang on to our vintage tallboy cans while aging into an era where coolness has become commodified care about that. Luckily, there’s now a lifestyle beer for not just us, but pretty much everyone.

What is a hipster?

To write the autopsy report on hipster beer, we must first wade into the nebulous matter of defining a hipster. The term was first coined in the 1940s to describe black jazz lovers, and was later co-opted by Norman Mailer to describe decidedly white “American existentialists.”

Over the decades, various monikers have been used to describe a privileged creative (and near-creative) class that tended to rebel against the mainstream: artists, bohemians, scenesters. If you’re like my sister, a 40-something former hipster who formed in Chicago’s Wicker Park punk and post-punk music scene in the early 2000s, the term hipster is derived from scenester, describing the socialites who gathered around local music venues. If you’re Williamsburg writer Robert Lanham, in his 2003 book The Hipster Handbook, hipsters were young people with “mop-top hair, brandished retro pocketbooks, talked on cellphones, and smoked European cigarettes.”

Hipsterism has long been accused of being a purely aesthetic subculture: “It reflected a young, urban, aesthetic-conscious lifestyle,” says Bellnot. “Unlike previous youth culture movements, it didn’t have a grand ideology, like anti-war hippies or anti-capitalist punks. It was more of a vibe.”

“More broadly, the contemporary hipster ethos, both in private and on the street, has been defined by an obsessive interest in the conflict between knowledge and ignorance, guilty self-awareness and permitted self-absorption.”

There was something real about being an intellectual, sauntering through the “indie sleaze” music scene or drinking PBR in a pub with a bike messenger while discussing Dave Eggers essays. Stylish twenty-somethings with liberal arts degrees, deep debt, and narrowing viable career options felt a nagging sense of emptiness. Meanwhile, gentrifying urban areas offered intellectually stimulating playgrounds and unintentionally fertile habitats for late capitalist commerce, writes sociologist Richard Lloyd in Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in a Postindustrial City, which follows Wicker Park’s hipster scene in the ’90s. Those seen as genuinely hip and genuinely resistant to the corporate mainstream often ended up quite successfully conforming to capitalist profit-mongering at work.

At the heart of all this is a feeling of uneasy introspection; in fact, it’s almost impossible to say the word without disdain. It was perfectly expressed in 2006 when The Onion ran the headline “Two Hipsters Angrily Call Each Other ‘Hipsters.'”

“More broadly, both in private and on the street, the contemporary hipster ethos has been defined by an obsessive preoccupation with the conflict between knowledge and ignorance, between guilty self-awareness and permitted self-absorption,” Mark Greif wrote in What is a Hipster? A Sociological Inquiry, published by n+1 in 2010.

From rock bottom to hipster heaven

So what do hipsters drink? How a big lager like PBR became a subcultural icon in the early 2000s was due to clever marketing of a brand that had all but disappeared in 2001. After more than two decades of decline, Pabst had hit rock bottom. The only silver lining was that a handful of bars in Portland, Oregon, were inexplicably short selling hundreds of cases and dozens of kegs of beer every week. So the company sent Neil Stewart, then PBR’s marketing manager, to investigate.

Through a series of corporate maneuvers, PBR became a popular beer sold for $1 at a few stores just around the corner from Reed College. Stewart soon noticed that the beer had developed a cult following among college students and mustachioed bike messengers with PBR tattoos on their thighs. Returning to Pabst headquarters in San Antonio, he pitched the idea of ​​sponsoring a bike messenger race in Portland. Thus began PBR’s hipster dominance.

“Hipster beer existed as an antidote to the pretentiousness of craft cocktails and craft beer. I think that’s why it took hold in bars and beverage media; it needed to complement that.”

PBR may have initially caught on among young, cash-strapped creatives, reflecting the hipster-spirited creative origins that gave rise to the movement, but it quickly became the cynical choice among those who could afford to buy flannel shirts at Urban Outfitters and drink something supposedly “better,” says Bellnot.

“If a Mexican-American grandpa drinks Tecate, it’s not hipster beer,” she says, “but if a 20-something creative director drinks it at a flophouse, it’s hipster beer. Why? It’s similar to what’s happening culturally right now with the valorization of American culture and Yellowstone. We’re all just marketing managers at internet start-ups, and yet we’re all worshiping the hardworking past.”

Part of PBR’s success may also have to do with actual enjoyment for its value.

“When you think about why PBR exploded in popularity, it was the intersection of economics and flavor,” says Carl Crockers, author of Beer Lover’s Chicago and co-founder of the craft beer review site Guys Drinking Beer. “You could get it for less and it tasted better.”

Crockers recalls wandering the bars of Chicago’s North Side with a man he met in the UK in the early 2000s, when Bud and Miller Lite were the staples on tap everywhere.

“We ended up somewhere and I ordered a PBR and he said, ‘That’s the first beer I’ve ever tasted,'” Crockers says. “Since coffee culture took off, people have rediscovered other flavors that maybe had disappeared. If Miller Lite and Bud Light are Folgers, it’s not a perfect match to say PBR is Starbucks, but you get what I mean.”

Over time, various big beer companies competed for hipster supremacy, which would vary from city to city: St. Paul, Minnesota-born Hamm’s, Detroit’s Stroh’s, Coors Banquet in chunky pill bottles, Tecate tallboy cans. Soon, another once-struggling brand, Miller High Life, was touted as the de facto hipster beer, thanks to advertising that cleverly played on post-industrial and craft fetishism.

But craft beer, the third-wave coffee of the beer world, never quite became hipster beer: Not only was it too expensive, Barnott says, but it also embodied the pretentiousness that the counterculture professed to abhor.

“Hipster beers existed as an antidote to the pretentiousness of craft cocktails and craft beer,” she says, “and I think that’s why they’ve been featured in bars and beverage media for so long; they needed to complement that.”

The end of the (fake) counterculture?

Inevitably, as hipsters get older (their palates evolve and their beards grow), they start asking for the things they really like, which now include the pricey craft IPAs and lagers that fit the category. Of course, brands have quickly leaned into nostalgia for what used to be hipster beers. There’s Lupulin Lite from Lupulin Brewing Co. (“It tastes like beer”), Wax Wings Brewing Co.’s easy-drinking Kalamazoo Lager, Haggard Barrel Brewing Co.’s Schraps (“Nothing beats Schraps… and the impact!”), and a revival of Pigeon Hill Brewing Co.’s Lake State Lager. The branding of each beer resembles the big beers that were once hipster beers, and each one presents itself forcefully as a regular beer. Crocker’s has dubbed 2024 “the year craft lagers invade big beer territory,” but like declaring the next It district or the next Kale, this may be wishful thinking from the craft beer camp.

Part of this prediction stems from the existential crisis facing both craft and the mainstream beer industry: brewing local IPAs alone is no longer viable. “Breweries have unused tank space that translates to brewing lagers, which takes longer,” Crockers says.

Meanwhile, the big lagers that were once called hipster beers are now “dad beers,” arguably the most mainstream beers today that aren’t just purposefully uncool but transcend age, class and geographic boundaries. The younger, cooler generation might call it vintage, “a symbol of another era,” like buying a second-hand sweatshirt at a thrift store, Crockers says. It remains to be seen whether we’re ready for a full-scale invasion.

But in this post-hipster beer, post-ironic age of instant gratification and commercialized cool, surely there must be an equivalent beer that younger generations are drinking self-consciously. What should we call it — lifestyle beer? Mysterious beer?

Barnott thinks Montucky Cold Snacks might be the closest thing she has to a modern-day hipster beer. She’s always told people about the pale lager, “What if PBR cared a little more?” not just in terms of taste and flashy merch, but in its outward support of a progressive political and cultural agenda. But Montucky is also a thoroughly mainstream brand at this point: Gallo, the world’s largest wine company, bought a stake in it earlier this year.

The alcohol industry has likely reached a point where hipster or baffling beers are no longer necessary: ​​”It’s about drinking what you love,” says Barnott, the drinking equivalent of twenty-somethings wearing fast-fashion Nirvana T-shirts simply because they like the way they look.

No more wasting your time on fake energy, fake-averse craft beer nerds and suspender-wearing bartenders. Craft beer has long since infiltrated shopping malls and movie theaters, and craft cocktails even come in cans. In fact, ready-to-drink beverages have fragmented into niches to suit every lifestyle and dietary preference, and the industry has consolidated so dizzyingly that, ironically, cheap beer may just be cheap beer again. Imagine that.