How long will it last? I was watching a certain current-politics show on HBO the other night, when the host flashed up what ostensibly was a line of craft-beer fanatics lined up for the latest release of cans at Other Half Brewing in Brooklyn, New York. The joke, of course, was that craft-beer geeks were even less cool than Star Wars fans.
The culture of waiting in line for new and limited releases is an anomaly in the history of beer but not necessarily the cultural outlier in American commerce that some make it out to be. Waiting in line for new Jordans has been a thing for decades. This past Christmas, people stood in line for a $60 video-game machine that played games from the 1980s that we all donated to Goodwill ages ago. Concert tickets and other limited tickets have traditionally required line waiting.
Still, something about waiting in line for beer seems antithetical to the very idea of beer. People don’t wait in line for wine, primarily because wine value is predicated on how much collectors can and will pay. For a wine bottle in high demand, there is literally no limit to how much a seller can ask. Culturally, high prices are celebrated as a function of quality.