Edinburgh Napier University

  There has been a revival of traditional beer in the UK and the craft beer market is becoming increasingly competitive, resulting in producers bringing a little more theatre to the category. Beer drinking is primarily about taste and, since consumers are ever more discerning, an industry has emerged around flavour training. This ensures that beer has its own language and servers are not at a loss as to how best to match a drinker to the ‘right’ beer. As wine has Sommeliers, now beer has ‘Cicerones’.

With professionalization in the serving of beer, what do brewmasters investing their identity in the craftwork of brewing think about this development? How do servers feel about it? And what value creation do drinkers experience from interacting with these professionalized beer servers?

This chapter traces craft beer producers’ efforts to organise work practices at the point of on-sale trade to investigate the extent to which professionalization functions as a catalyst of change in the experience of dispensing beer. How is this trend impacting on the other dimensions of employees’ lives? How do flavour-trained servers experience work and how is such training, or lack of, impacting career aspirations and opportunities?

Through analysis of owner/brewer/server interviews, promotional materials and auto-ethnographic consumer research, we explore the role that certified serving plays in recalibrating beer dispensing into spaces of professionalized work, and the potential for servers to alter meanings of ‘pouring a pint’.

We see parallels in other parts of the economy which have moved from a focus on production to service. In the music industry, live events have surpassed record sales as the source of revenue for artists. For many people, consumption and the active practice of music are intertwined. Such industrial shifts bring the loci of production and consumption closer together, changing the nature of work and eroding barriers between craftwork and consumption. Keeping with the orientation of the book, we question ‘where is all this leading to’?