When Joe Phillips left his church, he left music behind.
The sixty-something resident of North Berwick, Maine, has a gravelly baritone, but regulars at Corner Point Brewing Company know him more as “G.I. Joe,” the moniker inscribed on his mug club stein. On a sunny Saturday in late October, Phillips is not bellied up to the bar at Corner Point like usual. Instead, he’s sitting across the taproom at a picnic table with members of the Seacoast Beer Choir, holding a comb-bound collection of songs and singing loud like the church pianist he once was.
Seacoast Beer Choir is one of roughly 80 choruses organized under the national Beer Choir group. Founded in St. Louis in 2015 by Michael Engelhardt, Beer Choir has been running group sings at craft breweries across the United States since 2015. This is only the Seacoast chapter’s second event, and Phillips’ first. The combination of beer and song seems to have awakened something dormant.
“I missed the communal aspect of singing in groups,” Phillips says. “It’s one of the things I lost when I drifted away from religion. When I heard about this, I was like, ‘Great! Beer and singing! How can we go wrong here?’”
Beer Choir was founded during craft beer’s ascent. At the same time, Englehardt was trying to spark a nationwide movement to bring choral singing to public spaces. Naturally, he married his ambition with that of the brewers opening large-scale taprooms across the country, and those taprooms became his concert halls.
Their events are hosted by a song leader who directs the chorus, often alongside a pianist. Choristers refer to a 50-song booklet called the Beer Choir Hymnal, and anyone at the taproom is invited to lend their voice. Participation is prized over ability.
In 2019, Englehardt sold Beer Choir to Adam Reinwald, who operated their largest, most successful chapter in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Reinwald still operates Beer Choir with his partner, Sara Langworthy.
“We’re coming from a place of community building,” Reinwald says. “You’re always singing and you’re always hearing music, and you always have a chance to go back and get more beer.”
Beer Choir events are typically hosted on nights when breweries aren’t busy—Tuesday nights and winter Sundays. Over the course of two hours, the chorus runs through 15 to 20 songs, beginning and ending with their signature theme song, which was composed by Englehardt.
While Beer Choir is a modern invention, singing and beer have been joined about as long as the two have coexisted. In Ireland and Cornwall, England, patrons might launch into a full-throated rendition of “Drunken Sailor” or “Finnegans Wake.” In Germany and Czechia, a round of “Ein Prosit” or “Škoda Lásky” can make drinking feel like communion. These are the same traditions that American craft beer was drawn from, so it makes sense that a singing tradition would emerge where beer is poured stateside.
“Communities in the UK and Europe have an informal singing culture, where they go to a soccer match, and then you sing in the pub for the next few hours, and [Beer Choir] is the same type of idea,” Reinwald says. “If the US is a melting pot, maybe a microcosm of that is Beer Choir.”
In Ohio, Brad Pierson runs Whateverandeveramen, a singing ensemble that brings choral experiences to informal settings. The group operates like a roving flashmob of big voices, signing sea shanties and Irish melodies in settings as varied as city parks and capitol buildings. At Pierson’s event, the performers comprise the audience.
“One of the things that I’ve always disliked about ‘classical music’ is the sort of dichotomy that’s set up between performer and audience,” Pierson explains. “I wanted to be able to program music and program events that were not beholden to any sort of predetermined structure or rules.”
Unsurprisingly, Whateverandeveramen performs most commonly in craft breweries. Their annual Carols & Ales event, the flagship of their annual calendar, will be hosted this year at Batch Brewing in Detroit, Lovelady Brewing in Henderson, Nevada, and Earnest Beer Works in Toledo. Pierson finds that the setting disarms people. Breweries serve the same social function that church and art once did, so it’s only natural to bring singing out of those spaces and into the taproom.
“We did not necessarily start out thinking that we would be singing in breweries and restaurants, but that has turned into most of what we do,” Pierson says. “There’s no pretense, there’s no rules to how you can engage with it. If somebody decides they want to shout out in the middle of Brahms, they’re welcome to do that.”
Whateveraneveramen only runs ticketed events, so unlike Beer Choir, most folks are in on the event. But there are more organic models, too. At Four Phantoms Brewing Company in Greenfield, Massachusetts, every second Sunday of the month a group of folk singers host a freeform singing event in the back room. They call it Pub Sing!. The event has roots in the 1970s folk revival, but the organizers also draw from that European-style community singing that also inspired Reinwald.
At Pub Sing!, there’s no sheet music to read, no conductor to follow, and no accompaniment to match. Organizers Nicole Singer, Chris Bracken, and Crispin Youngberg simply start singing any old song of their choice, and others join in the refrains. The next singer volunteers a song, open mic-style. There are no restrictions about what song, but they encourage songs like “Amazing Grace” with quick-to-learn choruses. Youngberg has found that Four Phantoms is a particularly good host because they’re not only concerned with serving fine beer to the people of Western Massachusetts. They’re a community space.
“The fact that the focus is on the social interaction more than on the performance is pretty key,” Singer says. “We are all doing the same thing, and we are all spending time together, and also singing, rather than someone performing, and we are listening. There’s this very welcoming casualness to it.”
Bracken points to the term “casual” as being the signifier of Pub Sing!, but the same could be said of Beer Choir, Whateverandeveramen, and any community singing experience that springs up wherever beer is poured. Beer and singing are expressions of the same social desire to blend together. To commune in something and discover—or, like Phillips, rediscover—ourselves.
“We like beer, but we connect this kind of social singing as part of something wider,” says Youngberg. “We’re not rehearsing, we’re not performing, we’re just singing together with our friends, because that’s joyful.”
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