Lots of us work in jobs we are proud of.

We like our coworkers, we think the labour we do is important because of the social impact it has, and sometimes it helps us orient ourselves and our days in a way that works with other parts of our lives. Also, most importantly, it pays (at least some of) the bills.

The pandemic and its fallout made me think about work and the concept of labour diasporas. Diaspora normally refers to an ethnic or national identity of people who have relocated. But in this instance, I am referring to people who have moved professions in a large enough quantity to be noticeable.

Many brewers are in the beer industry because they love the work itself, but I think a big part of why brewing is such an appealing job is because of the social connections involved. Breweries are filled with creative people who come from a variety of backgrounds. Because of the nature of beer, and the alcohol involved, many people have other careers, and brewing is their side hustle.

During the pandemic, I had a series of conversations with friends about jobs, and identities and how for many of us they are so damned intertwined despite our best efforts. I've worked with tattoo artists, builders, engineers, painters, baristas, mixologists, and gardeners, but mostly I’ve worked with musicians. Musicians who became brewers.

Occasionally they were hobbyists. But many were semi, or full-time professionals doing regular gigs, often alongside their current job. After talking to a friend who’s also an ethnomusicologist, I started thinking about music as both an identity and as work. These conversations led me back to brewing again and again. Why had so many musicians turned to brewing as a second or third career? Does this count as a diaspora in labour?

***

Simon McCabe used to play in a successful British indie band called Black Wire, although he now lives in Finland, where he brews at Fiskars Brewery, and produces natural wine until the Noita label. His musician days in the UK were enabled by the commercial success of the band.

“Believe it or not there were actually benefits and support for musicians during the Labour government years,” he tells me. As both a millennial and an American I was shocked by this. Benefits for artists!? Simon elaborated, explaining you could get supplies and food money for gigging artists at the time. While everyone was basically skint, you could still cobble together enough money for guitar strings and some cigarettes.

While he loved music and was really having a good time making art with his friends, the commercial success was not enough to make ends meet. He was experiencing burnout and as Simon succinctly puts it, “everyone was making money except for those of us actually making the music.”

Why in every industry that produces something tangible does the primary labourer seem to make the least amount of money?

Production brewers often make little compared to other sectors within the industry like sales, marketing or distribution, which is ludicrous, given that they are the ones actually making the beer. Simon went on to explain that the burnout he experienced in his musician days was also fuelling a sense of resentment. He says there was a period of time when he became so disillusioned with everything that he couldn't even enjoy listening to music anymore, so he stopped entirely.

That loss of passion and joy in art confirmed everything I consider to be true about capitalism, our jobs, and our hobbies. Once we industrialise our passions and scale up—the more our creative spaces are commodified—the less joy we seem to get out of them. Interestingly, Simon’s journey into beer was in part enabled by his work in music. He revealed that he had lots of connections in the local bar scene from playing gigs and was able to get his beer into these places as a result. It speaks to a couple of things I've always taken for granted in our industry: getting some level of success is dependent on the networks we are a part of, and the spaces we get invited back to.

““Brewing and music are both pretty essential components of who I am and what I am about.””

— Charlie Cummings, Remnant Brewing

Much of the brewing industry functions at this low level of gatekeeping. Breweries hire from other breweries, brewers get their friends hired, and their friends are often from their past jobs or hobbies. Your buddy you knew from a band you were in, or your old drummer are two potential examples of the first people you might look to when you need extra help around a brewery. While this is certainly problematic in that it can really narrow the types of people who get invited into brewery workspaces, it also says something about the nature of the labour done by musicians, and why they are primed to thrive in the often questionable working conditions within the craft beer industry.

Musicians are used to working unconventional hours, the physical demands of a tour, and the constant demand for creative capacity. Brewers hours can be unpredictable in small business settings; much like a gig, the labour can run over your expected finish time, and very often a lot of the satisfaction you get from your job is the creative process of making something for the public to enjoy.

***

I work with a close friend, Mal McCay, at Heaney Farmhouse Brewery, a small, family-owned brewery based in Bellaghy, Northern Ireland. We often spend mornings chatting over work, discussing projects both in and out of the brewery. Over the course of several weeks, we discussed his background in music and his current work as a brewer at length. Music was his whole life before he and his wife Suzy welcomed their two kids into the world, and is still a significant part of their family life. Mal made pretty good money doing live music, he had fun doing it, but when I asked him why he left music for beer, he responded: “...that's a good question, because I have no idea.”

Part of it was certainly wanting to do something creative. Some people are just good at everything they pick up, and Mal is certainly one of those individuals, with an eye for innovation and a dedication to detail. He tells me how the birth of his kids made him want to do something lasting, and initially I assumed that was solely the brewery itself. Mal wanted to take the opportunity to create something that was a nod to the traditions of his wife’s family farm and merge it with something innovative and fresh. Beer was the obvious choice, because it allowed him to reignite his passion for music and incorporate it into his new career. Music is an important part of our daily beer-making.

We have a collective running list of beer names where Suzy, Mal, Ciaran (our resident homebrewer), and myself scratch potential beer ideas down on an old coffee-stained sheet of paper, and 95% of them are pulled from song lyrics. On brew days, one of us has a playlist blaring everything from jazz to rap to classic rock. Music is truly part of the process for Mal, which is something I’ve observed more than he has explicitly stated. He and Suzy want the farm and brewery to hold a place for artists in the future. A workspace and studio are part of the plan. This idea of creating space and carving out creative oases seems to be at the core of my interviewees’ identity within the context of labour in both beer and music.

“I honestly don’t think I could pick just one, I think [brewing and music] are both pretty essential components of who I am and what I am about,” Remnant Brewing’s Charlie Cummings tells me, Zooming from his home in Somerville, Massachusetts. He and I have known each other for a long time and I’m a little surprised at his response. I went into my interview with him with some expectations of how he would answer some of my questions, and this is not the response I was expecting.

I knew about Charlie’s band, Organ Meats, because we had brewed a mid-pandemic collab back in October 2020, and he sent some tracks over email. When you brew with Charlie, you brew to music, you brew about music and inevitably you will hear about his band. The collab we did, Guerrilla Radio, was an homage to one of the greatest bands of all time, Rage Against the Machine. Every time I spend time with Charlie or work with him music is always part of the conversation. He waxes poetic about his favourite artists and instruments over a shift beer, regardless of audience. During our conversation, I admit to Charlie that I held a certain image of him, that beer was a way to pay bills while music was his real passion. As we continue our discussion I realised that that might be partially true.

Truly, Charlie pours his heart and soul into every beer he’s made at Remnant, and worked hard to create a welcoming space for a diverse crowd of people. Reflecting on Charlie’s trajectory in beer, I realise something that’s true for all of the people I’ve talked to about this idea of musicians in beer. A central tenant is that beer and music are both spaces of labour. Sometimes labour is creative, community-centric, and full of human connection. But other times it is exploitative, exhausting, and seems to suck the humanity out of us. Both of these realities can be true. Which makes analysing a space like beer (and music) so complicated. It’s a reflection of ourselves and our messy humanity, and the reality of art under capitalism.

As such, the parallels with the music and craft beer industry are many, and as I spoke to these men about their journeys in both something became very clear to me. None of this is about defining ourselves through the job title we have or the band we belong to, it's about carving out spaces in unexpected places where we can best connect with ourselves, and others.

“Sometimes labour is creative, community-centric, and full of human connection. But other times it is exploitative, exhausting, and seems to suck the humanity out of us.”

This looks different for every artist and every brewer. For Simon, it ultimately meant finding a brewery that honoured his work-life balance in Finland, far away from the UK. For Mal, it’s the potential of Heaney to be an oasis for artists of every stripe in a desert of austerity and diminishing funding for the arts. For Charlie, it’s the freedom to honour all the parts of him: fatherhood, musicianship, and brewing. Capitalism is a global system of exploitation and we are all forced in some way to participate, most of us have jobs to get money to meet our basic needs, and those in our communities unable to participate in the neoliberal wage economy are often marginalised or neglected. Working in exchange for a paycheck to house and feed ourselves and others, the basic human needs for survival, has significant costs physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Is this what a work diaspora really is? Our need to replicate spades of familiarity and belonging as we navigate this massive, overwhelming system smothering us to oblivion? Despite this oppressive capitalist system we manage to carve out and build lifelong friendships and bonds with those we work with and develop community ties.

This to me is the very foundation of what makes humans so wonderful at our core. Our inherent pull towards each other and creativity. We seek out connections with others, and we flourish, despite the odds. Whether on the brew deck or in the throes of musical performance we seek out to reaffirm our humanity through relationship building and creative expression. Despite capitalism’s success in commodifying nearly every aspect of our daily lives, we resist it both in our rest and in our work.