Version 4.2

Lecture: It tastes horsey, bready, and fruity: Analyzing aspects of beer talk

In this talk I investigate characteristics of beer talk, the language used to describe beer and the practices surrounding it. Beer talk has developed out of the Craft Beer movement and it displays certain unique linguistic characteristics. Identifying and analyzing them gives the researcher an insight into how this register about beer is structured.
The corpus for this talk consists of descriptions of beer types on the American website craftbeer.com. While every beer type has its own distinct description, certain structures can be identified, especially concerning the description of color, smell, taste and, if mentioned, ingredients. In the process of describing it, beer is personified and the connection to the geographical and historical origin is stressed.
The theoretical foundation for the analysis is derived from the talk about wine, coined oinoglossia (Silverstein 2003). Nevertheless, even though the basic structure is comparable, oinoglossia and beer talk show different characteristics that come with the difference in ingredients and consumption. With a semantic analysis, the specific metaphors used in the description are analyzed and the categories they are borrowed from will be presented.
The whole phenomenon of Craft Beer and the linguistic characteristics surrounding it are influenced by the historical role of beer as the beverage of the poor people, especially when compared to wine. Due to this, also advice and facts given with the description of the beer types are strongly linked to geographical and historical locations, in order to communicate a sense of community, the community of practice drinking Craft Beer.