Working Class is Where You Find It: Steel Toe Stout

For me there is something of a disconnect between a beer that is hard to find or high in price and the notion of a working class guy or gal plunking down their last crumpled up wad of one dollar bills for a six pack. I think on a national scale, this is an unlikely scenario and that folks we think of as working class are probably still supporting the brewing industry by their purchase of Pabst, Bud and Coors…and Miller…oh, and Schlitz. Man, there are a lot of truly working class beers out there when you get right down to it. So, let’s leave cost out of the equation for the purposes of this conversation and deal with the availability angle.

I might consider Ska Brewing Steel Toe Stout to be a working class beer if I’m pulling it off the cooler shelf at a corner market in Durango, Colorado, but I don’t think of it the same way when I’m buying it at a national liquor store chain in Phoenix. This notion figures closely with Stan Hieronymus’s recent piece “The Importance of Drinking Local” in All About Beer magazine. Mr. Hieronymus speaks of the special experience that comes, as a visitor, with stopping by a local establishment to sample locally produced beers. I guess I’m flipping this scenario on its head and pointing out that a working class beer really only caters to the working class of the region in which it is born and that once that beer leaves the neighborhood in the back of a truck, it becomes a different kind of beer for the masses. Not a bad thing, just a distinction, folks. (I don’t include the big brewers like Miller, Coors and so forth in that equation since they are all around a different animal and have been playing both sides of the working class/white collar fence for decades.) I suppose this is another aspect of what I've been referring to as setting and circumstance.

Hard-to-find working class beers probably grow out of the old days when there were more local brewers who catered to the local working folk. I believe that situation is coming back into vogue in places like Oregon and Colorado and perhaps parts of California. Local working men and women latch onto a particular local brand of beer that’s made by the brewpub or microbrewery in town or just down the road. These are truly working class beers in the original sense. I think where the disconnect comes is when a beer leaves it’s neighborhood and receives wider distributorship; it becomes too much of a novelty in the other places where it’s offered. You can’t be working class, rare and quirky at the same time and (though I’d promised to leave price out of this discussion) you definitely can’t be all those things and expensive.

What about the beer, dummy?

I can’t say that I was bowled over by Ska’s entry into the milk stout category; it was good enough I suppose. I'm partial to all stouts and porters anyway. My notes from last Friday state: “Dark coffee color, almost opaque. Quick tan head with medium lacing. Faint coffee taste, slight sour finish then gone.” I suspect that, served on tap in some dimly lit bar in southern Colorado, this stuff is dynamite. I'll buy this again, if the price is right. I also like Ska's website and suddenly wish I could be in Durango today – especially since it’s going to hit 90 degrees here at Beer Rant Headquarters this afternoon! Browsing Ska's other beers, I’m also feeling inclined to go out and find some of their imperial porter!

See you 'round the jobsite!

Too Much Information....


Which brings me to the whole “working class” handle. I wear steel-toed boots every working day of the week. (Those are my clod-hoppers in the picture.) Am I working class? I have a college degree and spend about as much time in an office as I do out in the field. Am I white collar? I was summoned to a state senator’s office to explain a constituent issue a couple years ago; does that make me white collar? I wore steel-toed boots during my visit to the capitol; does that make me working class? During the introductions, when I gave my name, the senator indicated that I was the guy on the hot seat. I looked around the table and then at the senator and said, “I think I’m the lowest paid guy here, so that makes sense.” Does that make me working class, or just stupid?