While cultural practice in the Ottoman port cities showed a rather liberal blending of various shades of modernity, discourse produced by the middle classes intended to rein in the freedom identity development. In chastising mimicry of the West as well as insufficient mastery of modern etiquette, Turkish and Greek bourgeois picked up uponcriticism of port city society by foreign observers. The attribution of class characteristics to nations is also characteristic both of the foreign observers and the local middle class. Attempts to conform to international middle class standards is combined with the need for national distinguishability. Only in rare cases did individuals who did not comply with the conformity the middle class attempt to impose and out themselves as "super-Westernized."

Beer in the late Ottoman Empire became a highly symbolic product used by contemporaries to either affirm or reject Europeanization. It was associated with individualism, a positive outlook onto the future, and mixed sex sociability. Its opponents rejected it as a product alien to local culture and social practices, and considered beer drinkers to be vainly glorifying European culture and displaying antisocial behavior. In Thessaloniki however, social inclusion or exclusion was negotiated along the possibility to enjoy and profit from beer.

The polyvalence of late Ottoman port city society, with its many different ethnic and religious communities, overseas and local cultural influences, and the failure of the Ottoman state to provide a convincing common identity for its heterogeneous population combined to make identity building a highly complicated process. Depending on individual stance, locals could find this predicament a possibility to carve out an identity that transgressed against more narrow, community-determined norms. Others however, felt the challenge to develop a personality that met the standards of the coming twentieth century a burden they could not creatively master within the commercial surroundings of the port city. Especially the bourgeois and the ecclesiastical elites of the respective communities, aimed not to negate the possibilities of the age as a whole, but to restrain most forms of individualist and in their eyes morally precarious pursuits, thus restricting the manifold possibilities contemporaries actually had to develop their personality.

In the early 1800s, beer was practically unknown in the Ottoman Empire outside of some expat communities. As of the 1830s, its production increased, but was restricted to small artisanal breweries and was the subject of NIMBY protests. By the 1860s and more so the 1880s, it gained popularity in mainstream society and as of the 1890s was produced in industrial quantities. Tax cuts succeeded in making the Ottoman market less dependent on imported beer and to establish local brands as market leaders.