Saturday 2 July 2011

Ring, meet hat.

He of the intimidating surname, Matt Kirkegaard, editor-in-chief of Australian Brews News, earlier this year posed the question, What is ‘craft’ beer? He has also recently dedicated an episode of Radio Brews News to the question.

It—the question—was prompted by the U.S. Brewers Association, who had decided to provide a strict definition of what craft beer is.

Except that they didn’t. What the U.S. Brewers Association answered is, What is a ‘craft’ brewer? and offered three high-level descriptors—small, independent, traditional—with some lower-level detail for each.

So here’s why the U.S. Brewers Association is a little bit full of crap.

I’ll begin by defining craft beer.

craft beer n. Any beer brewed with an emphasis on craft (i.e. quality, and with skill), with or without the use of traditional methods of brewing, where profit is not an overriding motive of the brewer.

Now that’s a pretty loose definition. If one were to stoop to using dots to distill the essential impacts of this definition, it would look like and mean that:

  • It’s all about intention; thus
  • A massive, commercial powerhouse brewery is perfectly capable of brewing a craft beer;
  • A brewery need only attempt to skillfully craft a beer of high quality, regardless of the end result;
  • A brewery need not have to meet any old-school standards when attempting to skillfully craft their skillfully-crafted beer of high skill-level; and
  • Although profit is obviously required of all breweries to remain viable, a craft beer is not brewed with a fundamental goal of being as accessible to the masses as possible in order for market penetration to lead to buckets of money.

Now I know dot number two comes as quite a shock to all of us, but it certainly doesn’t mean that said powerhouse breweries are craft breweries, only that they can, if they wake up one morning and feel like making the world a better place, decide to brew a craft beer alongside their regular mass-produced and mass-marketed offerings. For example, Carlsberg has their yearly Jacobsen Vintage, a barrel-aged Barley Wine that, while admittedly massively overpriced, fits the definition.

To define a craft brewery then, I would say:

craft brewery n. A commercial brewery whose output is predominantly craft beer.

Dammit, I went and done did a loose definition again! Prepare for incoming dots!

  • A craft brewery should be a registered business with commercial output; and
  • A craft brewery’s output should, for the most part—or if you want to get technical, >50%—be beer that fits the earlier definition of craft beer.

I’m not so rigid on that second dot. We can haggle on the percentage, but I know that it has to be more than fifty percent.

But now we have a problem. What happens when a craft beer starts to see true market penetration and starts appearing in mainstream pubs and bars and the brewery is now dedicated to outputting a certain volume of the exact same recipe to satisfy their monetary requirements through growth and the expectation of regular drinkers? Is that beer still a craft beer?

Anyway, I too may be a bit full of crap. I welcome any and all forms of discussion and disagreement.