MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The craft beer industry has become immensely popular with new breweries popping up around the country and some locations becoming craft beer destinations. In addition to invoking a sense of community and stimulating local economies, craft breweries also contribute to their location’s distinctive sense of place. Place image, or the way that people conceptualize a location, motivates travel and influences engagement with a destination. Thus, an understanding of how visitors perceive a location and the experiences that can be cultivated there is vital to both attracting and satisfying tourists. Despite the popularity of craft breweries, little research has examined how breweries reflect, reinforce, and/or reinterpret local history, geography, culture, and natural features to attract tourists. The aim of this study is to explore how breweries located along the Carolina coast depict the shared stretch of shoreline. An in-depth examination of breweries spanning the North and South Carolina coast was conducted. Employing a semiotic driven discourse analysis, wherein place is viewed as a cohesive text that can be “read” through visual and linguistic cues, researchers collected a diverse data set that included brewery names, beer types, information about the imagery depicted on signage, menus, souvenirs, and décor, as well as names and descriptions of the beers offered. Data was analyzed in aggregate and findings suggest that while many breweries capitalized on the local natural and built elements of their region to create their distinct image, in turn drawing attention to the fragile nature of the coastal environment, there were surprisingly few allusions to the romanticized, old Antebellum south. Instead, breweries largely utilized icons, monikers, and other symbols reminiscent of the many coastal- and ocean-based myths and histories that depict man’s power over nature and society, thereby reinforcing already dominant place narratives and neglecting large swaths of the local and visiting population.