Pursuit of hoppiness: qualitative study of Finnish craft beer hobbyists’ consumer identity

Abstract

Popularity of craft beer drinking is growing fast globally, and in Finland. Despite the global decline in beer sales, the number of Finnish craft breweries has doubled since 2008, every month a new Finnish craft brewery is founded, and the global media talks about a craft beer boom. Yet, the context of Finnish craft beer consumer world completely lacks previous academic research.

The purpose of this study is to be an initial explorative study of Finnish craft beer hobbyists and their consumer identities. At the same time this study aims to give a glimpse of understanding into the transformation of localized cultural capital into broader cultural capital by looking at the role of social status and cultural capital in consumer identity building. To accomplish this, the research builds on the theories of consumer identity, consumer identity work, subcultures of consumption, social status, and cultural capital.

Qualitative research method is chosen for this exploratory study. The research builds on social constructionist paradigm, subjectivist epistemology, and structutralist methodology. The method of the study is social psychological discourse analysis that aims to find and analyze the identities, subjective positions and interpretative repertoires of craft beer drinkers. For the study semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight Finnish craft beer hobbyists.

The findings of this study introduce the different interpretative repertoires the interviewees use in their identity talk to build their consumer identity. The hobbyists use different subject positions when talking about the hobby, and thus reveal what kind of identity they seek and with what kind of discourses it is built. This study shows that craft beer hobbyists see themselves as (1) experimenters and explorers, as (2) analysts and critics, as (3) hedonists and connoisseurs, and as (4) teachers and gurus. Together the four interpretative repertoires give a comprehensive picture of an identity of well knowledged, analytic yet hedonistic person, who has taste and whom others look up to.

The findings and interpretations lead to discussion that craft beer hobbyism a vehicle for consumers to incorporate taste into their habitus and increase their cultural capital. It is argued that craft beer subculture is quite an easy-to-access community, that offers a cheap and a simple to understand way to gain cultural capital. These characteristics could be reasons behind the trending of craft beer hobbyism, and a reflection of our current postmodern consumer society. It is discussed how marketplace fragmentation and the abandoning of old societal identities has led to boom of consumer subcultures used to build multifaceted consumer identities.