Teach Your Business How to Swim: Rise and Fall in Digtopia

Digbrew Co. was a Digbeth-based brewery celebrated nationally for the quality of its beers, and, especially, for its ability to create a thriving community. The taproom became notorious for their new creations in brewing, and for a curated theatrical experience of the inner workings of the business where fiction and reality often mingled. With a collaborative ethos at its heart, and with the haste of the constant making of new recipes, designs and events that generated an honest space of novelty and innovation, business at Digbrew Co. did not follow the traditional money-making standards. This approach, reckless and fast-lived however, resulted in unexpected creations (such as the very first opera about beer), and a huge legacy for many people and the city of Birmingham.

Having closed its doors in January 2023, Digbrew Co. and its history are explored in this exhibition as a lens to interrogate Digbeth, a promised land marketed as an utopia, but often experienced as a dystopia by many through the brutal processes of gentrification and a global pandemic. Throughout the design of its labels, beer pump clips, and other memorabilia inspired by nostalgia and the mythology of its own expanded universe, there is a critical vision of Birmingham socioeconomic context pre- and post-pandemic. All of these materials now are part of Birmingham City University’s ADM archive as a new collection that critically reflects a crucial time in the recent history of this city, as well as that of many others going through similar post-industrial transformations..

Teach your business how to swim: Rise and Fall in Digtopia pays homage to the story of Digbrew Co., delving into the dialogue between a crude reality and the fiction they generated to empower their existence as a brewing venture.

Curated and designed by Infinite Opera and Oliver Webb, and commissioned by the ADM’s Keeper of Archives, Dr Pedro Cravinho.

Acknowledgements: Arts, Design and Media Archive Team, ADM Exhibition Team, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Performative Arts, and ADM Digital Technical Team.