What Is Dead May Never Die: Institutional Regeneration through Logic Reemergence in Dutch Beer Brewing

Progressive vs. regenerative institutional change

Previous research, which has predominantly documented progressive forms of institutional change (Suddaby, Ganzin, and Minkus, 2017; Zietsma et al., 2017), has shown how modernization typically involves a process of logic replacement, as in the case of the U.S. higher education publishing industry in which a market logic came to supplant an editorial logic associated with the professions (Thornton and Ocasio, 1999). In other cases, progressive institutional change may lead to logic blending, such as in the legal services field, in which idiosyncratic local logics were merged into a global logic with the advent of global law firms (Smets, Morris, and Greenwood, 2012). Progressive institutional change is thus commonly portrayed as being fueled by exogenous institutional elements.

Other research, however, indicates that institutional change can also take more regenerative forms through the reemergence of traditional logics (Greve, Pozner, and Rao, 2006; Marquis and Lounsbury, 2007; Schneiberg, 2007; Weber, Heinze, and DeSoucey, 2008), suggesting that the seeds for change may at times be found by looking inward and backward to institutional elements from the past (Schneiberg, 2007). Regenerative change likely unfolds, at least in part, through mechanisms that are distinct from reported processes of progressive logic replacement or blending. But in spite of the phenomenological evidence that institutional change often has cyclical tendencies (Thornton, Jones, and Kury, 2005; van Gestel and Hillebrand, 2011; Nicolini et al., 2016), this alternative pathway of institutional change awaits further theorization. We find inspiration for this theorization effort in a small set of studies that hint that decomposed institutional logics leave behind remnants that may continue to play some role in field-level dynamics long after they have been put aside.

Traditional craft brewing

Dutch beer brewing historically evolved as a typical craft industry (Kieser, 1989; Thornton, 2002; Crone, 2015) in which field-level instantiations of the institutional orders of the family, community, religion, and the guilds functioned as custodians of craft. Traditional breweries were small, manually operated, and owned by skilled craftsmen. ² Craft was such a dominant logic in the field that the industry was historically slow to develop the distinction between wealthy owners and dependent workers typical of many other industries (Unger, 2001: 159, 213). Most large breweries were run by families that owned multiple brewing businesses (Philips, 1999), and the cross-generational transmission of brewing skills often relied on family ties. Traditional brewing was thus rife with conservative forces for maintaining community- and family-specific brewing practices, resulting in traditional breweries producing a vast variety of beer styles with considerable differences across geographies (Unger, 2001: 124–125, 128–129; Mulder, 2017). This variety persisted until the beginning of the twentieth century (Schippers, 1992). As an ideal type, traditional craft brewing thus involved a concern with maintaining community- and family-specific brewing practices; handwork and small-batch production; and a degree of mysticism around the brewing process, which depended on the difficult-to-obtain tacit skills of brewmasters, who tended to enjoy high status in their communities.

Modern industrial brewing

The Industrial Revolution, the invention of the corporation, and substantial improvements in the transportability of perishable goods ultimately enabled both the proliferation of modern industrial breweries and the emergence of a very different institutional logic around the turn of the twentieth century. Although there were many other examples, Heineken is the epitome of industrial brewing. It was established in 1864, when the son of a trader in cheese and butter acquired a struggling traditional brewery that had recently become a limited liability company. Heineken quickly developed into one of the largest breweries globally by focusing on mass production of industrial lager. The economic rationalization of beer brewing by Heineken and others led to a dramatic homogenization of products (Jansen, 1987; Philips, 1999), such that by 1980 all of the beer produced in the Netherlands could be classified as industrial lager and traditional breweries had failed en masse (Hoelen, 1961; Schippers, 1992; Unger, 2001). ³ As an ideal type, modern industrial brewing involved a concern with profit, market power, and economies of scale; an automated and standardized brewing process; and a highly rational approach to the organization of production and sales, in which brewmasters became operations managers who were hierarchically subjected to financial and sales managers. Table 1 contrasts the ideal-typical logics of traditional craft and modern industrial brewing.

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Table 1.

Ideal-typical Field Logics of Traditional Craft Brewing and Modern Industrial Brewing

	Traditional Craft Brewing	Modern Industrial Brewing
Associated societal-level logics	Family, community, religion, traditional professions (guilds)	Market, corporation
Root metaphor (organizing principle)	Brewing as tradition	Brewing as business
Taken-for-granted ideational elements
Producer mission	Tradition driven: Maintaining community- and family-specific brewing practices	Sales driven: Profit though growth, efficiency, and standardization by producing and selling beers on the largest possible scale
Audience need	Beer as a source of daily nutrition	Beer as a democratic and benign drug taken for recreation
Role of brewer	Master of mystical craft	Operations manager
Sources of legitimacy (product quality)	Quality is in the status of the producer’s community or family	Quality is accessibility and consistency across time and space
Embodying material elements
Authority structures	Brewing family ownership; brewer = owner	For-profit corporation; brewer ≠ owner
Production method	Small-scale, handwork	Large-scale, automated
Ingredients	Various, depending on local availability	Bulk, cost-efficient, large suppliers
Beer styles	Traditional top-fermenting; local variations	Modern bottom-fermenting; standardization (Pilsner)
Distribution	Local community	International

Remnants of the decomposed craft-brewing logic

The dominance of the large industrial brewers led to substantial diminishment and, ultimately, dissolution of the roles of field actors who used to carry traditional craft brewing. But this decomposed logic left behind institutional remnants that continued to be at least partially conserved, examples of which we provide in table 2. We distinguish between ideational and material remnants and differentiate among three types of mnemonic traces through which these remnants were conserved: memories, texts, and artifacts. Examples of institutional remnants that ended up playing an important role during subsequent processes of regeneration were abandoned schemas and rules around community-specific traditional beer styles, discarded technical objects such as traditional brewery buildings or brewing plants, and memories of deflated roles such as brewmaster or brewing family. The evidence in table 2 is not exhaustive, since our observations are likely skewed toward remnants that ultimately were recorded or recollected. In addition, we have ascribed examples of institutional remnants to specific types of mnemonic traces, while acknowledging that institutional remnants often leave behind multiple types of traces simultaneously. For example, discarded brewery names may be recorded in memory, texts, and artifacts. ⁴

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Table 2.

Types of Mnemonic Traces and Examples of Institutional Remnants Left Behind by the Decomposed Traditional Craft-brewing Logic in the Netherlands

Types of Traces	More Ideational Examples	More Material Examples
Memories	Deflated culture	Deflated roles
Mental pictures of the culture and roles related to the traditional craft-brewing logic when it was dominant, which became deflated when the craft-brewing logic decomposed.	Product variety. During the 20th century the variety of available beer brands and styles was drastically reduced with the proliferation of Pilsner beer and the dramatic concentration. By 1980, almost all of the beer on the Dutch market was Pilsner with very few identifiable differences in taste (Jansen, 1987). The few remaining alternatives to Pilsner, such as Gulperner’s Dort and a few bock beers, were also bottom-fermenting beers with limited distinction in taste. The product variety that was an important characteristic of the traditional craft-brewing landscape persisted only in memory.	Brewmaster. As power shifted toward managers, non-brewing families, and shareholders during the 20th century, the role of brewmaster was changed from being the lifeblood of the brewery to being not much more than an operations manager (Schippers, 1992; Schutten, 2006). Indeed, industrial breweries often refer to “brewing operators” instead of brewmasters. Many brewmasters would recall and experience this as a deflation of their profession and organizational roles. The role of brewmaster was restored by the newly founded craft breweries that once again had a brewmaster at the center of the organization.
Other examples:	Product appreciation; geographical embeddedness	Brewing family; pub owner; brewers’ guild
Texts	Abandoned schemas & rules	Abandoned practices & structures
Writings stored in archives that described the schemas & rules and practices & structures of the traditional craft-brewing logic when it was dominant, which were abandoned when the craft-brewing logic decomposed.	Traditional beer styles. Kuit is a style of beer that was first brewed in the Netherlands in the 15th century in Haarlem and later in Delft and Gouda, which were then important brewing towns (Hallema and Emmens, 1968). It was distinct from other styles in that it relied on oats as the primary grain. Dutch brewers exported kuitbier across Europe until the end of the 17th century, after which the style went into decline due to scarcity in brew oats and the shift toward bottom-fermenting beer styles. The beer style was revived in 2014 by the Dutch Campagne Nederlandse Bierstijlen, which encouraged Dutch brewers to reintroduce the style according to the campaign’s guidelines. Since 2015, the style has been registered by the Brewers Association in the U.S., which means brewers can submit kuitbier for competition in the World Beer Cup. (http://www.cnb.nl)	Manual brewing procedures. Traditional craft brewing required a substantial amount of handwork (Schippers, 1992; Hornsey, 2003), from the inspection of the ingredients, to the milling of the grains, which in small breweries was done with a hand mill, to even the inspection of the temperature during brewing and, finally, the dispension of the beer before consumption, which was often done through a handpump. The Industrial Revolution brought new technologies that led to a change in brewing procedures and the discrediting of any form of handwork. Recent craft brewers have been relying on handwork once again. An extreme example is Brouwerij De Prael in Amsterdam, which relies on handwork for almost every part of the brewing process to facilitate its social mission to provide employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities.
Other examples:	Traditional knowledge of fermentation; traditional town recipes	Professional ownership; sourcing from the local farm
Artifacts	Discarded symbolic objects	Discarded technical objects
Objects scattered around the landscape that carried the symbolic and technical elements of the traditional craft-brewing logic when it was dominant, which were discarded when the craft-brewing logic decomposed.	Brewery and beer names. De Drie Hoefijzers was a brewery in Breda that was established in the 16th century and derived its name from the blacksmith located across the street. Toward the 19th century it was the biggest brewery of the province of Noord-Brabant. In 1968, the brewery was acquired by British Allied Breweries and merged with the Oranjeboom brewery in Rotterdam. As with many other traditional breweries, collectors preserve the symbolic artifacts in the form of labels, beer caps, and other items that display the brewery and beer names. In 2004, Brewery De Beyerd revived the brand. Established on the same street as the original brewery, it reintroduced the brand “Drie Hoefijzers Klassiek” to name its first beer and mimicked the label of the traditional brewery. (Interview with Mikel de Jongh; www.nederlandsebiercultuur.nl; www.bieretiketten.nl)	Brewery buildings. Brouwerij De Leeuw in Vessem was established around the end of the 17th century. The brewery building survived a big fire in 1904. In 1954, the brewery was sold to Heineken as the De Rooij family, who had run the brewery for three generations, struggled to compete with the large industrial brewers. The facade of the brewery became a protected local heritage site. Since 2011, the building has served again as the location for a brewery after the establishment of brewery De Gouden Leeuw by an ex-employee of Heineken. (www.nederlandsebiercultuur.nl; www.brouwerijvessem.nl)
Other examples:	Brewery and beer logos; brewery decorations	Brewing plants; beer containers (e.g., bottles, barrels, jars)

Impediments to regeneration of craft

While these remnants appear to be important resources for institutional change (Schneiberg, 2007), regenerating them was rife with challenges due to their significant degree of decomposition. First, although there were individuals who could act as custodians of these institutional remnants, they were dispersed and had either become disembedded from the field or had completely switched to modern industrial brewing. Until 1980, there had been no collective efforts in the field to maintain or conserve elements of the craft-brewing logic (Mulder, 2017). Craft-brewing remnants were therefore scattered around the field. Second, the remaining remnants provided only an incomplete set of representations of the traditional logic, which was insufficiently actionable. Knowledge of the traditional fermentation process, for example, could not be gained from mnemonic traces alone. Especially difficult to reconstruct were the ideational elements providing schemas, norms, and vocabularies of practice (Loewenstein, Ocasio, and Jones, 2012; Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury, 2012; Ocasio, Loewenstein, and Nigam, 2015). In some ways, this mass of decomposing cultural material was thus waiting for a theory or a fire (cf. Coase, 1984). Third, due to the prior organizational failure of its carriers, remnants of craft brewing had a low level of remaining legitimacy, if not a stigma. Traditional craft brewing had come to be associated with inferior quality as compared with modern industrial brewing (Schippers, 1992), in part because of the political efforts of the modern industrial brewers (Daane, 2016). Compliance with increased “quality” regulations imposed in 1926, which had resulted in part from industrial brewers’ lobbying efforts, required substantial investments in ingredients and equipment, which many traditional breweries were unable to make (Daane, 2016). These policies, which had institutionalized crisp industrial lager as the dominant and qualitatively superior product, combined with the natural stigma associated with failure initially disqualified remnants left behind by the traditional carriers of craft brewing as legitimate building blocks for later change efforts.

In spite of these challenges, however, the craft-brewing logic reemerged in the Netherlands through the establishment of 489 new breweries between 1980 and 2016. These new organizations collectively regenerated the institutional remnants of craft. This led to fundamental institutional change, as these organizations contributed to the restoration of the institutional orders of the community, family, professions, and religion in the field. A look at the first 209 new breweries showed that the vast majority of them were deliberately established as local craft-directed enterprises: 66 percent had clear ties to the community, and 82 percent had a brewmaster who was also the owner. At least 26 percent were explicitly run as family enterprises, and 6 percent were religious enterprises or made prominent use of religion in their communications. To understand how this process of logic reemergence occurred, especially in light of the described challenges, we set out to comprehend the actors engaged in regenerative activities and how their collective efforts led to the observed reemergence of craft and field-level change.

Understanding the context

We engaged our data with open minds to achieve a rich understanding of our context. First, we worked on achieving a deep understanding of the historical evolution of the field. Following common practice in process research (Langley, 1999; Zietsma and Lawrence, 2010; Delmestri and Greenwood, 2016), we constructed both a high-level historical narrative for distant history and a detailed list of key events for more proximate history; see Online Appendix E. The chronology allowed us to identify the beginning of the craft revival and the key actors involved in the process, and it was an important source for identifying the different examples of institutional remnants shown in table 2.

Second, adopting an interpretivist lens (Langley and Abdallah, 2011; Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton, 2012), we developed a deep understanding of the organizational actors involved (also see Lounsbury and Kaghan, 2001; Zilber, 2017). A key aim was capturing the founding stories of many organizations and giving as much “voice” to our informants as possible (Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton, 2012: 17). This involved deep interactions with the founders of new craft breweries and with the founders of pioneering beer pubs and of the consumer movement organization PINT. The collected stories and observations gave us general insights into field actors’ backgrounds, their motivations, their struggles, and the resources they had at hand to overcome founding challenges. We noticed that although nascent craft breweries had all disassociated themselves from industrial brewers, restored the role of brewmaster, and reintroduced traditional top-fermenting beer, they were not a homogenous group. We observed a number of important points of difference that informed our interpretation of the reemergence process.

Third, to better understand the different ways in which actors interacted with institutional remnants, we induced a categorization of the different contemporaneous incarnations of the craft-brewing logic. We followed what Reay and Jones (2016) described as a “pattern-inducing” approach to derive patterns from our interview data and capture organizational instantiations of field-level logics. Rather than imposing predefined categories on our data, we searched for emerging themes to capture organizational differences related to logics. This allowed us to stay open to the unique lower-level instantiations of higher-order logics or institutional orders in our empirical setting. After numerous iterations, we differentiated among three organization-level reincarnations of the traditional craft-brewing logic that are associated with different societal-level institutional orders. We compared the constructs that emerged from our field data with similar logics reported in prior studies and with the ideal-typical societal-level logics theorized by Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury (2012) to refine our labels.

Developing a base model

We used “temporal bracketing” (Giddens, 1984; Barley, 1990; Langley, 1999) strategies to identify discrete phases based on a chronological ordering of the data. We identified phases to reflect relative continuity in the context and nature of the actions within the phase but discontinuity at the boundaries between the phases (Denis, Lamothe, and Langley, 2001). This step had two iterative components. First, we distinguished between different stages of logic reemergence, using our case chronology and brewery population data to identify critical junctures. ⁵ Second, we created an initial data structure for the process model by dividing our actors into different groups, such as pioneering pub founders, craft brewery founders, and consumer movement activists, and summarizing their activities. This allowed us to distinguish between different sets of activities and different aspects of the logic reemergence process. We then compared our observations with the findings of similar process studies (Purdy and Gray, 2009; Nigam and Ocasio, 2010).

Inspection of the initial data structure revealed that the activities of all actors involved in the logic reemergence process were heavily intertwined, recursive, and co-constitutive but also that there was some degree of temporal ordering. Activities had different starting points and were at least partially dependent on previously initiated activities. For instance, the activities of pioneering pub founders who drew attention to the decomposition of traditional craft brewing in the Netherlands appeared to be essential for the establishment of collective organizations like the consumer movement organization PINT. In turn, texts produced by movement actors provided nascent brewery entrepreneurs with important ideational elements, such as schemas, norms, and a vocabulary of practice. While using these temporal fault lines, we iterated among our event history, our data structure, and other studies to identify starting points and consequences of different sets of activities, ultimately settling on defining labels for three unique albeit highly overlapping stages of the logic reemergence process.

Subsequently, we constructed a tentative “visual map” (Langley, 1999) based on our initial data structure, which captured our early high-level understanding of the process of logic reemergence. This base model distinguished between a beginning and an end state, sketched the relations between the different actors and field-level changes at every stage of the logic reemergence process, and labeled the arrows guiding our preliminary understanding of the interlinking mechanisms connecting the stages.

Constructing a final theoretical model

During the final step, we refined our data structure and elaborated our base model by examining key mechanisms through a series of more focused analyses. For each stage, we paid close attention to the role played by institutional remnants, which emerged as a key construct during our prior analytical iterations. In particular, we closely examined the interrelationships among three aspects of the logic reemergence process: different regenerative activities, related changes in the status of the remnants of the decomposed institutional logic in the field, and related regenerative institutional changes affecting the composition of the field. We then iteratively refined our concepts and relationships until there was a close fit between the model and data.

Although we recognize that stages partially overlap and have recursive and co-constitutive properties, we focused on a visualization that illustrated the differences between each stage of logic reemergence most clearly and that indicated important transition conditions: specific challenges that needed to be overcome through particular sets of regenerative activities if regenerative institutional change was to progress and result in field-level change.

We present our findings by first describing how the craft-brewing logic reemerged in the Netherlands through a chronological delineation of the key activities and mechanisms that we identified through our analysis and then present our theoretical model.

Drawing attention to traditional alternatives

A key development was the emergence of five independent beer pubs that were not contractually tied to any industrial brewer and that began to import modest amounts of traditional foreign craft beer, predominantly Belgian ale, as an alternative to Dutch industrial lager. These locales, where individuals with “strange tastes” could meet (to quote a representative of one of these pubs), were Café De Beyerd in Breda, Gollem in Amsterdam, Jan Primus in Utrecht, ‘t Pumpke in Nijmegen, and Locus Publicus in Rotterdam and Delft. The idea to import foreign beers emerged when the founders of these pubs came in contact with traditional beer styles that were still being brewed in Belgium, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Piet de Jongh (Café De Beyerd) explained to us:

I wasn’t always interested in beer. I enjoyed going to Belgium, my father too. We took the children to the Belgian coast and that’s where I got to know all the speciaalbieren. There were different local beers all along the coast. And that’s where I learned to recognize and enjoy the difference. I thought it would be fun to try it here too. I really wanted to specialize with a new type of café, not just a neighborhood café.

The owners of pioneering beer pubs started with very modest means and ambitions and were surprised by the impact of their actions. Their initial success was followed by an emerging network of importers that began to specialize in foreign traditional craft beer. One of these was Biergroothandel De Kikvorsch, established in Altforst in 1975. These pioneering activities provided a window into the brewing industries of Belgium, Germany, and the United Kingdom, where traditional craft brewing had managed to survive, which led to increasing public attention to traditional alternatives to modern industrial beer brewing. Some brewery founders we interviewed recalled the galvanizing role played by these pubs. Willem Thuring, founder of Brouwerij Bourgogne Kruis in Oosterhout in 2012, said:

Café de Beyerd in Breda was my favorite pub. During my time at high school I went there to play table football and billiards in the breaks. As such, when I was 17 I had already participated in a beer tasting competition. I regrettably lost the certificate, but I did become “beer king.” They serve you a number of Trappist beers, and then you have to say from which breweries they are. That was a lot of fun, and it was the first pub that served Belgian beers including on draft. That was really special.

Reawakening dormant logic custodians

The attention given to traditional alternatives reawakened actors with marginalized or dissolved roles, who were dissatisfied with the state of the Dutch beer-brewing industry. The exposure to foreign traditional craft beer led to these actors’ growing perception that something had been lost in the Netherlands with the shift toward industrial brewing. The pioneering beer pubs gave these actors a chance to meet and (re)connect. One of these, Gollem in Amsterdam, began to organize an annual beer festival in 1978 for alternative Dutch beer. Initially, this was a very small-scale affair, but the festival grew from 65 to over 300 visitors within two years and would eventually attract more than 10,000 visitors (Daane, 2016; PINT, 2017). The festival focused on bokbier, a dark German beer style that can be brewed as either a modern lager or traditional ale, which was at the time a rare alternative to industrially produced pilsner. The pubs and their festivals thus provided an important space for marginalized actors, like enthusiast consumers, brewmasters, and pub owners, to connect and discuss the state of Dutch beer brewing. Importantly, these groups contained both individuals with access to institutional remnants and individuals who were entirely new to beer brewing.

Establishing nostalgia- and change-promoting collectives

The reawakening of local custodians of craft brewing and the growing exposure to foreign traditional craft beer inspired feelings of nostalgia and mobilized resources to promote change in the industry. A group of Dutch beer enthusiasts who frequented the pioneering pubs also regularly traveled to London to visit pubs there. They noticed that the diversity of beers and brewing practices was higher in the UK and that there was a consumer association—the Campaign for Real Ale or CAMRA—promoting the revitalization of traditional craft brewing. This group would go on to establish the Dutch beer consumer association PINT. Nico van Dijk, one of the founders and the first chairman, explained:

In 1979, I had become a member of CAMRA and we went to England for an annual general meeting. There, we submitted a motion to set up a Benelux CAMRA. ⁶ And those chauvinistic English said: no way. Then we sat at the bar with Joe Goodwin [chairman of CAMRA at the time] in the evening, and he said: “I really think it’s a bit of a shame because I think it’s a wonderful project. I want to help you. Here you have 50 pounds and the mailing list of the CAMRA members in the Benelux.” There were some Belgians and a total of 40–50 Dutch. With the help of those 50 pounds we bought stamps and then wrote to those people. We then organized in a café here in The Hague the first meeting. About 10 or 12 showed up. It was a very diverse group of people. There was a biologist, a candidate notary, there were a few pub boys, a beer dealer, a trader in agricultural machinery . . . but the majority were consumers. The initial meeting led to a number of subsequent meetings. I was the initiator and chairman, and it was all a bit difficult. Then I once had a tirade and asked, “Are we going to establish this club or not?” Eventually, we found five men, including me, to go to a notary, and an act was drawn up and then PINT was established in November 1980. We were not allowed to use the name CAMRA.

The establishment of PINT initiated the emergence of an ecosystem of new collective organizations that all contributed to a nostalgia-infused movement for change in the industry. In 1983, Nico van Dijk co-established a foundation for beer item collectors (BAV), which fueled greater awareness of traditional Dutch craft brewing. In 1984, the first modern brewers’ guilds—De Roerstok and Twents Bierbrouwersgilde—were established to encourage hobby brewing, inspiring a new generation of brewery entrepreneurs. The Bier Keurmeesters Gilde (BKG) that trains judges for the independent examination of the quality of amateur beers during competitions and tastings was established in 1986. And in 1987, an association for specialty beer pubs (ABT) was established, which acted as a catalyst for the distribution of craft beer. Collectively, these initiatives amplified the initial effect of the pioneering pubs. They revitalized marginalized actor groups by reawakening traditional members, providing them with spaces to reconnect and reflect, and attracting new recruits. The hobby-brewing scene provided an alternative portal for outsiders and new generations to enter the field, one that did not involve socialization in modern industrial brewing.

Curating institutional remnants

The establishment of these collectives was also associated with a dramatic increase in the amount of text produced about Dutch beer-brewing history. For example, PINT released a bimonthly magazine in which it regularly published stories like the one below:

The last brewery, that made a top-fermenting yeast beer, was and still is the beer brewery De Schaapskooi in Tilburg. Up until 1958, Brouwerij Marres in Maastricht also still made a top-fermenting yeast beer. . . . Heineken is now the biggest brewery in the Netherlands and one of the biggest in Europe. Since 1864, Heineken has taken over the following breweries: [what follows is a list of 13 Dutch breweries that were acquired by Heineken in over a century. Similar lists follow for Skol and Artois, predecessors of what is currently known as AB InBev]. (PINT Nieuws 1, Nov. 1980: 5–7)

The beer item collectors association BAV also published a bimonthly magazine that frequently reported on historic Dutch breweries. A number of writers also began addressing the history of Dutch beer brewing (e.g., Philips, 1982; Jansen, 1987). As a result, there was growing awareness of the history of Dutch brewing, and a growing amount was recollected and curated, increasing the availability and accessibility of the remnants of the craft logic.

Thus during the first stage of logic reemergence, institutional change took off once ties between the previously dormant and dispersed custodians of the decomposed logic were regenerated. This involved restorative activities as dormant actors were reawakened, ties between them were reestablished, and the remnants of the decomposed logic were again made available and accessible. It also involved transformative activities as the dormant custodians of craft became organized in new ways, new recruits became absorbed in these networks, and foreign entities also came to be regarded as representations of a craft-brewing logic that had decomposed in the Netherlands.

Disrupting the modern logic

These texts were especially visible in the communications of the consumer association PINT, which became an important vehicle for the reproduction and dissemination of texts on traditional craft brewing and regenerative institutional change. These texts reflected how actors were actively disrupting the modern industrial brewing logic by enabling a new discourse on alternatives to industrial pilsner. PINT’s membership grew from 30 in 1981 to over 1,000 by 1994, and its bimonthly magazine attracted an increasingly wide readership in the Dutch beer-brewing field. But since PINT became organized around multiple local chapters that kept close ties with local pubs, hobby brewing associations, and eventually nascent craft breweries, which were not necessarily members of the association, the texts it produced were indicative of a developing national discourse and captured the regenerated vocabulary of practice surrounding craft brewing that began to emerge from reestablished networks. PINT not only provided a platform for alternative voices in the beer industry but also deliberately disseminated texts about what was “wrong” with the beer industry and what remedies were needed according to emerging ideas that were constitutive of this discourse.

A recurring component of these texts was the use of frames in which prototypical examples of modern brewing, industrial brewing corporations such as Heineken, were depicted as a foil to provide a favorable contrast for craft brewers. For example, PINT Nieuws often questioned the practices of the brewing corporations, implicitly blaming them for the “destruction” of the Dutch beer-brewing culture. In the words of PINT founder Nico van Dijk:

More than 99% of the beer that is consumed is pilsner. It’s even more amazing if we look at the assortment of beer offered by the bigger breweries. Take Skol in Breda as an example. Things aren’t going well for either Skol or its parent company, Allied Breweries in England. Look at the numbers. What did this multinational do? They got involved in Dutch breweries. They allowed well-known, established brand names to disappear and closed breweries that they had taken over. (Opening speech, 4th National Bock Beer Festival, Nov. 1981)

Reinterpreting and repurposing institutional remnants

The texts produced around this time also reveal how the ideational elements of craft brewing were regenerated by reinterpreting and repurposing institutional remnants. Throughout the 1980s, institutional change efforts were framed as attempts to restore brewing traditions. In the first issue of its news magazine, PINT listed its eight goals, which we show in Online Appendix F. They were reproduced on the last page of every new issue until 1991. These goals included:

Objectively informing the consumer about: . . . traditional brew- and drafting methods and the renewing of interest in beer culture in the Netherlands. . . . Stimulating breweries to produce beers brewed in a traditional way, without unnecessary, unnatural additives, filtering and pasteurization—henceforth referred to as “traditional beers.” (PINT Nieuws 1, Nov. 1980: 1)

While reflecting the importance of tradition, these goals also indicated that the notion of traditional beer might be interpreted in different ways. These texts suggested that restoring traditional brewing practices would solve three problems that were perceived to be affecting the Dutch brewing field in 1980. A first perceived problem was the decline of Dutch beer culture as a result of the mass extinction of traditional breweries during the concentration driven by the modern industrial beer producers. PINT encouraged the restoration of traditional beer brewing as a way to revive Dutch beer-brewing culture. PINT produced extensive reports on dissolved traditional craft breweries and mobilized members to preserve some of the smaller incumbents, which were the closest embodiments of the craft-brewing logic, even if they had switched to modern brewing practices. When the large British brewing conglomerate Allied Breweries announced that it would close a previously acquired Dutch brewery in Arcen in 1980, PINT supported a small team of ex-employees who wanted to continue brewing at the same location. This led to the establishment of De Arcense Stoombierbrouwerij, the first new brewery in the Netherlands since WWII and the first to reintroduce traditional top-fermenting beer brewed on Dutch soil.

A second perceived problem was the decrease in appreciation for beer or the declining role of the beer consumer, as evidenced by the association of beer with mass consumption rather than sensory appreciation. Peter Eissing (co-founder of PINT) wrote:

We’re allowed to discuss the bouquet, the rich taste and the beautiful color of a fine wine. Do this about a fine beer—and there are those beers that are just as good as fine wines—and people think it’s a little strange. You don’t talk about beer, you just knock one back. Perhaps this is caused by the fact that most people see beer only as pilsner. (PINT Nieuws 1, Nov. 1980: 4)

Texts would promote the reintroduction of traditional beer styles to solve this issue. PINT wrote extensively about traditional craft beers that used to be produced in the Netherlands or were still being produced in other countries that could instill a culture of appreciation. For example, PINT Nieuws featured a report on the brewing history of Breda:

In the southernmost provinces, throughout history, people drank a great deal. That was the case in Breda. As was written in an earlier article, there were 11 brewers active in Breda in 1416. The assortment of beers at that time was enormous. Breda was famous for its brown beers and wheat beer (witbier). (PINT Nieuws 18, Nov. 1983: 4)

Every issue featured similar reports on traditional Dutch brewing practices or current practices in foreign countries, offering detailed information on how particular beers were produced. For example, PINT published an extensive history of the Trappist Brouwerij De Koningshoeven, reporting on its attempts to bring back traditional craft beer. In an interview, Eissing reflected on how beer enthusiasts thought about these traditional beer styles:

The inspiration from the past is based on the diversity of the products on offer in the past. . . . Tastes have changed. However, the variety that was produced in the past [still serves as inspiration]. We hang on to that. It would be wonderful to have that kind of variety again.

At the same time, hobby brewing became increasingly regarded as an important means for reintroducing lost beer styles. Since professional brewing training focused exclusively on modern industrial brewing techniques and industrial brewers were unlikely to change their practices, it was clear that the reintroduction of craft brewing required a process of “lay expertise” development and legitimation (Croidieu and Kim, 2018). PINT actively supported hobby brewers to acquire and diffuse the skills necessary to reengage with traditional brewing practices.

A third perceived problem was related to the quality of the beer produced by the brewing corporations. PINT members questioned the use of chemicals during the brewing process. The third issue of PINT Nieuws contained a report entitled “Are chemical additives in beer harmful?” written by Peter Molenaar, a founding member of PINT who was also a biochemist. The article included a long list of additives that brewers were allowed to use and criticized the current regulations on beer additives. Voicing concerns about beer quality, beer enthusiasts favored the reintroduction of traditional craft beer “without unnecessary, unnatural additives, filtering and pasteurization” (PINT, 1980). These concerns centered on the idea that brewers used additives to cover up mistakes or “manipulate” the brewing process to save costs. For instance, reference was frequently made to the German Reinheitsgebot, a medieval traditional beer ordinance prohibiting German brewers from brewing beer with any ingredient other than water, barley, hops, and yeast. Beer enthusiasts generally favored this purist approach to brewing, but in lieu of additives, brewers needed knowledge to control the brewing process. The reports published by PINT on these issues reflect beer enthusiasts’ attempts to regenerate knowledge of traditional craft brewing by recombining the domestic remnants of craft brewing with active foreign representations. What is remarkable here is that the dramatic failure of traditional Dutch craft brewers was partly due to their association with the impure practices and incompetence that prompted the regulations imposed in 1926. The remnants of the decomposed craft logic were thus gradually transformed from something that had become useless into something that held considerable value for many field actors.

Recombining categories to theorize traditional alternatives

The proliferation of texts on craft brewing provided a regenerated vocabulary, facilitating processes of sensemaking and sensegiving of traditional alternatives in a modern context. This meant a dynamic recombination of new and preexisting categories that would ultimately pave the way for the emergence of a new set of collective norms and schemas. The evolution of this regenerative process was particularly apparent in the social labeling of craft breweries and their beers. Texts initially relied heavily on the Dutch labels of traditie (traditional) and ambachtelijk (artisanal) in contradistinction with modern brewing practices, thus referring to traditioneel bier or ambachtelijke brouwers. These labels were used by nascent brewery entrepreneurs such as Jan Ooms, co-founder of De Scheldebrouwerij in ‘s Gravenpolder (established in 1994), who said:

Ambachtelijk means trying to get the most out of something in a simple way with the available resources that you have at hand. . . . My brew master has also worked at Interbrew and there processes like filtering for instance mean pushing a button and opening a tap. Ambachtelijk means milling yourself, not by pushing a button or automatically. Instead you feel the whole process, you taste it, you smell it, you are busy with the process from front to back.

While these labels appealed to the traditional custodians of craft brewing, other actors in the regenerated networks resisted. For example, Herm Hegger—founder of Brouwerij Raaf, established in Heumen in 1984, and Stadsbrouwerij De Hemel, established in Nijmegen in 1996—told us:

I have always been bothered by the tension between the false romanticism that beer lovers like to hear and the ordinary reality of beer brewing. For example, people pretend that beer brewing is very ambachtelijk and they make reference to the past, but that does not make any sense. All beers that were brewed over 100 years ago were disgusting. . . . Beer brewing is a vak [trade]. You write your own recipes. There is no such thing as old recipes. I hear that sometimes, but that’s drivel I want to get rid of. . . . I, myself, have built a modern plant and am therefore at the forefront in terms of technology. I try to have every technology in house as long as I can afford it.

As networks expanded and came to represent more diverse voices, the adherence to tradition faded. With the growing interest in Belgian beer, the vocabulary shifted toward the more inclusive labels of speciaalbier and speciaalbierbrouwerij that were popular in Belgium to refer to traditional craft beers and brewers. The adoption of these labels implied a subtle transformation of the initial schemas of the reemerging craft logic. On one hand, the theorization of how speciaalbier production ought to be organized continued to rely on notions from traditional craft brewing. For instance, speciaalbier was synonymous with traditional top-fermenting beer, as Belgian traditional producers were the prototypical exemplars of speciaalbierbrouwerijen. On the other hand, the relatively ambiguous meaning of speciaalbier offered enough leeway to allow for both traditional and more modern interpretations of craft practice. As a result, a collective schema emerged in which a variety of entrepreneurs identified themselves as speciaalbierbrouwers aiming to revive Dutch beer-brewing culture by following predominantly active Belgian examples.

Although the speciaalbier label was an important element of the early schemas providing new frames and scripts to nascent craft brewery founders, regenerating the ideational elements of a decomposed logic was an ongoing process, and over time we also observed a shift away from this notion. Increasingly, Dutch craft breweries began to adopt the Anglicized label of craft bier in their vocabulary. In December 2016, the Dutch collective for independent microbreweries changed its name from KBC to CRAFT to be more inclusive of craft producers of bottom-fermenting beers, who felt excluded by the speciaalbier label. This change reflects the increasingly transformative nature of regenerative activities, allowing traditional craft elements to blend with facets of modern industrial brewing.

Thus during the second stage of logic reemergence, the ideational elements of craft brewing were regenerated through the dissemination of texts that recombined categories to make sense of craft brewing in a modern context. This involved restorative activities through which particular labels and scripts were brought back into use. But it also involved transformative activities, as new labels and scripts were needed to positively distinguish decomposed production arrangements from modern ones while allowing room for some material blending. The emergence and evolution of norms and schemas ultimately enabled a variety of legitimate contemporary reincarnations of the craft-brewing logic.

Mobilizing founders of new organizations of traditional form

The first breweries to reincarnate the craft-brewing logic were Trappist Brouwerij De Koningshoeven in Berkel-Enschot near Tilburg, reestablished in 1979 after the brewing operations had been licensed to an industrial lager producer, and De Arcense Stoombierbrouwerij, established at the abandoned industrial brewing site left behind by Allied Breweries in Arcen in 1981. Brouwerij Raaf in Heumen (founded in 1984) was one of the first new breweries to be set up from scratch. These founders attempted to integrate the principles outlined by PINT into new organizations. But they faced considerable challenges at the time, and it was highly uncertain whether their initiatives would be able to survive. Herm Hegger explained:

There were no suppliers, no market for buying and selling. That’s why I made my own brewing installation and to get the cost of rent down I decided to rent a run-down location that I then fixed up myself. The building was a former brewery from 1915. The building had remained empty the entire time, and I renovated it and started brewing there. I had all sorts of tricks to make it feasible for me. A brewery is actually a very capital-intensive business, but with these kinds of workarounds I could make it work.

By the end of our observation window (in 2016), only 2 of the 17 entrants of the first cohort—those established from 1981 to 1990—were still active and fully independent. Pioneering founders were not primarily driven by economic motives but would justify their actions in terms similar to those employed by PINT. Hegger explained, “I was ambitious. I wanted to encourage the spread of speciaalbier across the Netherlands.” Founders of alternative breweries were also inspired by the emerging frames that painted the modern industrial brewing corporations as a common enemy that they could mobilize against. Many founders objected to the brewing corporations’ practices, and some were especially emotional about this. For example, Wim Smit, founder of Brouwerij Sloth in the small town of De Steeg (established in 1981), said:

I’ll give you an example of how Heineken operates. If you come across a café that sells Heineken, that café is in debt to Heineken. Say the café owner comes to you to buy beer and the Heineken man comes along. . . . Then the café owner has to get rid of the beer on the spot, otherwise he’ll hear: now that loan you have from Heineken? You’ll have to pay that back next week because the contract specifies which beer we allow you to have on tap here. And those really are the gangster-like methods that they use! (From interview published in De Winter, 1986)

Broadly, three different revitalized groups of field actors founded new breweries. They represented different marginalized field roles, and although they all identified with the regenerated norms and schemas of craft brewing, they were attracted to different aspects of the regenerated craft-brewing logic due to differences in their values and beliefs related to their backgrounds across different societal-level logics.

Reusing and displaying institutional remnants in the construction of alternative product offerings

Each type of founder reused institutional remnants when constructing their nascent breweries, but for each type the balance between restorative and transformative activities played out differently. Founders of breweries who reincarnated craft brewing as tradition emphasized restoration over transformation. A telling example is Museumbrouwerij De Roos in Hilvarenbeek, which was established in 1997 to restore and conserve the remnants of a traditional brewery that had failed 60 years earlier but later began to brew its own beer on a small scale as well. The volunteers who worked for this brewery strived to bring back and display many elements of the former brewery in their original state. To brew beer that met modern quality standards, however, some transformative adjustments were required. This was illustrated by the welcoming text on the brewery’s website:

[T]he only authentic beer brewery in the Netherlands. . . . Museumbrouwerij De Roos in Hilvarenbeek is a unique village brewery from the 19th century. Here you’ll experience the world of traditional beer. Volunteers have successfully restored the old building and its inventory and have even built a new brewery. De Roos has become a living museum in which history, knowledge . . . and fun go hand in hand.

This contrasts with founders of breweries that aimed for scientific perfection when reincarnating craft brewing and prioritized transformation over restoration. These breweries started from the theorized principles of a speciaalbierbrouwerij, or at later stages craft brouwerij, and restored traditional beer-brewing styles and techniques. When possible, however, these elements were modernized to allow for the highest possible degree of control over the production process. An illustrative example is De Haagse Bierbrouwerij in The Hague, established in 2001, whose founder Anton Schults told us how he applied industrial principles to the production of traditional beer styles:

An important development for me was the bit of automation that I carried out. Things like connecting pumps to the computer and valves that have been replaced by electronic valves that can be opened and closed by the computer. That everything should be ambachtelijk and a bit primitive is an image I do not want to have. There is nothing ambachtelijk about it. You are engaged in an industrial process. An industrial process that can only be 100% good if it is automated, simple as that. . . . My main and only objective is to achieve the highest possible product quality. Because that’s exactly what is lacking in the world of small breweries. It is a big problem for small brewers to deliver quality continuously. . . . I do not want that, I want a good product that is consistent in quality. I work very carefully and want to permanently keep an eye on the quality so that it never changes. I have also perfected the recipes.

Finally, founders of breweries who reincarnated craft brewing as artistic expression seemed to balance restoration and transformation. They did not experience brewing traditions as a constraining force and used institutional remnants as an inspiration for experimentation. They also felt less inclined to gain strict control over the production process and did not mind that each batch of beer would come out slightly different. They restored the traditional craft-brewing logic by bringing back forgotten recipes, ingredients, or techniques but also contributed to its fundamental transformation by combining traditional ingredients with more exotic inputs, such as particular fruits and, later, American hops. An example of this type is Brouwerij De Molen in Bodegraven, whose products have received widespread critical acclaim. Menno Olivier, who established the brewery in 2004, had started as a hobbyist and gradually gained more brewing experience working for short periods at several nascent craft breweries. He then built his own microbrewery, using it to provide brewing workshops. The success of these activities led him to start his own brewery in a historic flourmill. He acquired modern stainless steel scraps from the dairy industry and, like many other founders, built his own brewing plant that allowed for artisanal production processes. The brewery became known for the fact that each batch of beer was unique and sold as such. As Menno said, “I have a very pampered taste so I always want to taste something different, and that is why I make all kinds of different beers. I don’t want it to always be the standard type. With Heineken you know what you get, and that is exactly what I do not want. I do not want to have a uniform product.”

Table 3 summarizes these ideal-typical reincarnations of the traditional craft-brewing logic, placing them on a continuum reflecting differences in the degree of blending between traditional craft brewing and modern industrial brewing.

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Table 3.

Ideal-typical Reincarnations of the Craft-brewing Logic in Dutch Beer Brewing

	Traditional Craft Brewing	Reincarnations of Craft Brewing			Modern Industrial Brewing
Associated societal-level logics		Family, community, religion, traditional professions (guilds)	Family, community, religion, traditional professions (guilds)	Creative professions, religion, community		Modern and creative professions	Market, corporation
Root metaphor (organizing principle)	Brewing as tradition	Craft brewing as restored tradition	Craft brewing as artistic expression	Craft brewing as scientific perfection	Brewing as business
Taken-for-granted ideational elements
Producer mission	Tradition driven: Maintaining community and family-specific brewing practices	Story driven: Restoring local brewing traditions and legacies; brewing beer the way it used to be produced traditionally and educating audience to appreciate history	Product driven: Producing variety of beers with unique taste and educating audience to appreciate product	Production driven: Producing highest quality of beer through perfect control over production process	Sales driven: Profit though growth, efficiency, and standardization by producing and selling beers on the largest possible scale
Audience need	Beer as a source of daily nutrition	Beer as a portal to relive the past	Beer as an opportunity for sensory experience	Beer as a technical object for evaluation	Beer as a democratic and benign drug taken for recreation
Role of brewer	Master of mystical craft	Historian	Artist	Scientist	Operations manager
Sources of legitimacy (product quality)	Quality is in the status of the producer’s community or family	Quality is in the story around the product	Quality is unique taste	Quality is technological perfection in terms of measurable aspects	Quality is accessibility and consistency across time and space
Authority structures	Brewing family ownership; brewer = owner	Brewing family or community ownership; non-profit foundation	Sole proprietorship or private limited liability; brewer = owner	Sole proprietorship or private limited liability; brewer = owner	For-profit corporation; brewer ≠ owner
Embodying material elements
Production method	Small-scale, handwork	Small-scale, handwork	Small-scale with experimental techniques to maximize taste	Small-scale but modern technology with complete control	Large-scale, automated
Ingredients	Various, depending on local availability	Traditional ingredients; no chemicals or additives	Unique and high-quality	Yeast as key ingredient; own cultivation	Bulk, cost-efficient, large suppliers
Beer styles	Traditional top-fermenting; local variations	Top-fermenting based on traditional styles and recipes (e.g., kuitbier)	Top-fermenting with rare and complex taste (e.g., Black India Pale Ale)	Top-fermenting with scientifically perfected recipes	Modern bottom-fermenting; standardization (pilsner)
Distribution	Local community	Direct distribution and some local pubs and local stores	Dispersed, at specialist retailer or pub	Through wholesaler, national	International

The blending of traditional craft elements with facets of modern industrial brewing facilitated diffusion by ensuring that regenerated traditional alternatives conformed with modern expectations. Founders combined traditional and modern elements in different ways and to different degrees. One example was the reliance on brewmasters steeped in modern industrial brewing, who were able to apply scientific principles to traditional recipes. Another example was brewing craft beer in plants closed by modern industrial brewers, such as in the case of De Arcense Stoombierbrouwerij. Finally, many breweries blended local brewing traditions with market trends. For instance, Brouwerij De Vecht in Loenen aan de Vecht, established in 2016, brewed Ambachtelijk 1710 Loender Bier as an India Pale Ale, a beer style that had recently become popular in the Netherlands, rather than attempting to restore it as close as possible to the original form.

Toward the end of our observation window (in 2016), the traditional craft-brewing logic had successfully been reincarnated, as evidenced by an established market for regenerated traditional alternatives. Craft brewing had gradually moved from being forgotten, to a popular hobby, to a serious field-level phenomenon. Even in terms of market logic metrics, the revival was starting to look impactful. Conservative estimates put the market share of independent craft brewers at 5 percent of 1.2 billion liters for 2015 (de Voogt, 2016; Nederlandse Brouwers, 2016). This estimate does not include the amount of alternative beer sold by the large incumbent brewers, however, which is another 8 percent (Nederlandse Brouwers, 2016). The changing strategies of incumbent breweries showed that craft brewing, in addition to invoking notions of restored tradition, artistic expression, and scientific perfection, had become a considerable business. Whereas in the past modern industrial breweries acquired traditional breweries only to close them and consolidate market share, they now acquired them to maintain them as semi-independent entities and gain a toehold in the growing craft beer market. For example, Heineken acquired the traditional family brewery Brand in Wijlre in 1989 and has continued to run it as an independent brand. Similarly, Bavaria acquired control over the brewing operations of Trappist Brouwerij De Koningshoeven in 1998, even though the monks maintained ownership of the brand and continued to be involved in the brewing operations. That the propagators of modern industrial brewing are now searching for ways to reintegrate traditional craft brewing into their organizations is perhaps the clearest evidence that the traditional craft-brewing logic has not only reemerged but has come to challenge the industrial brewing logic that had once obliterated it.