Storytime in the Craft Beer Bar: Narratives, Gobbets and Segments

This chapter explores how talk ‘works’ and examines some bases for the stories which are produced when servers and drinkers talk with one another during a service encounter. More specifically, we explore how bodies (human and non-human) interact via the medium of storytelling in the craft beer bar. In the world of conversations between people behind the bar and customers in the new world of craft beer and authentic drinking experience, we probe for the stories of bar people, initially postulated as the narratives of occupational precarity. In this chapter, we focus on how apparently disjointed segments of discourse act as “gobbets” which, by their incompleteness, provide tentative platforms of latent meaning available for exaptative re-amalgamation in future conversations.