🧱 Tear down that wall (gently)

You’d assume customers gravitate toward products with aspirational names, but the opposite is true for craft beer.

A new study that analyzed data from beer review site Beer Advocate between 1996 and 2012 found that when it comes to craft breweries — defined as making 6m barrels or less per year — beers with names that would typically elicit negative emotions have stronger consumer appeal.

Uh, why?

By 2012, Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors had gobbled up so many smaller brands that they controlled 90% of beer production, per The Atlantic.

Conversely, the craft beer movement — for both consumers and brewers — flew against mass production and was instead “steeped in authenticity,” University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor Olga Khessina told The Hustle.

• Khessina co-authored the study alongside J. Cameron Verhaal (Tulane University) and Stanislav D. Dobrev (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee).

And when brewers come out with offerings like Ugly Pug or I Hate My Boss Coffee Stout, those names reflect that independence — which Khessina’s research indicates may be even more important than how the beer tastes.

Does this translate to other industries?

There are wines and spirits with weird names — take Cat Pee on a Gooseberry Bush Sauvignon Blanc or Dirty Water Distillery’s Bog Monster gin — but Khessina said it’s not as common.

Those craft movements started later and have yet to reach the same scale as beer.

What about cannabis…

… where strains have names like “unicorn poop” or “grandpa’s breath”?

Sure, because both have ideologies in opposition to something, Khessina said. For craft beer, it’s mass production; cannabis remains federally illegal.

“Strong oppositional identity demands authenticity in expression and behavior and encourages rebellious (i.e., counter-normative) attitudes and actions with which negative naming of products strongly resonates,” Khessina said.

Hear that, rebels? Enjoy your Ill-Tempered Gnomes and Geriatric Hipster Clubs this weekend. For nondrinkers, there’s always Liquid Death, the canned water brand that grew its revenue by 4,000%+ by branding itself like a craft beer.

Looked into building a home or renovating a home lately? There’s no shame if you went catatonic looking at the price tag.

The overall cost of construction materials today comes in 37% higher than pre-pandemic numbers. Supply chain issues of late surely haven’t helped calm things down.

Though price and supply fluctuations in natural materials aren’t exclusive to this moment in history, there are some uniquely hard times ahead (see: shortage, copper).

All of this is driving some German businesses to try speeding up urban mining’s adoption into the construction mainstream, according to Worldcrunch.

Sounds great… what is it?

Urban mining is the process of retrieving raw materials from waste for reuse.

• And goodness, construction produces a lot of waste — more than one-third of all waste generated in the EU comes from construction and demolition.

It all seems intuitive: When buildings are knocked down or renovated, their materials would be assessed for recyclability, then viable metals, concrete, bricks, etc. would be reused in the project.

But adoption hasn’t gone wide in construction for a few reasons: limited technical know-how, belief in the inferiority of used materials, and high disassembly costs.

Back in Germany…

… builders hope their pilot programs will show a way to clear those hurdles:

• One architect says recycling materials for a new office complex saved eight tons of waste and actually brought costs down.
• A consultant evaluated 465k+ tons of in-use material for a renovation project, finding a loss rate of only 5%-10% in metals and ~20% in concrete.

Regulations could ultimately force builders’ hands. The German government, per Worldcrunch, may eventually require new builds to register a “resources passport” accounting for sustainable material usage.

We’d wish them well, but we’re off to look at more material cost charts and have a good cry.