A few years back the Brewer’s Association, an organization I have been a member of for years, decided to put pencil to paper and develop a definition for a craft brewery.  If you are interested you can follow this link http://www.brewersassociation.org/pages/business-tools/craft-brewing-statistics/craft-brewer-defined for the detailed definition, but the gist of the definition is that a craft brewery is one that produces less than 2 million barrels of a certain type of beer per year.  There are a few important rules, however. For example if a large brewery owns 25% or more of the craft brewery then that brewery no longer qualifies as a craft brewer.  Redhook and Widmer are two such breweries that got booted from the club by this definition.  You are also not a craft brewer if you use adjunct to dilute the flavor of more than 50% of your production.  It’s OK to use adjuncts as long as they don’t dilute flavor or if they do dilute the flavor of the beer the brand cannot be a huge seller.  Go figure; if Duvel were an American beer it would not be considered a craft beer by this particular rule.

I recently heard a Saturday morning news piece on NPR about the Boston Beer Company.  It seems that the brewers of Sam Adams have recently surpassed the 2 million barrel mark and the obvious question about their status was discussed.  So much money has been spent over the years by Boston Beer on advertising and today they are arguably one of the best known craft brewers in the nation.  There has been plenty of controversy over the years about this particular brewery since they began as a contract brewer.  Currently they own two production facilities in Ohio and Pennsylvania along with their R&D brewery in Boston and brew all of their own beer at these breweries.  But now they are potentially going to be kicked out of the craft brewery club unless the definition is changed to accommodate their size.

I personally think all of this is kind of silly.  In my pragmatic opinion the definition could have stated that all breweries in the United States are craft brewers except Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Coors and any brewery partly owned by one of the Big 3 (now more like the Big 2.5 now that SAB Miller and Molson-Coors have established the odd animal called MillerCoors) since that was clearly the intent of the definition.  It was sugar coated to make it more palatable to promote, but any one with knowledge of the brewing industry understood the code language.  If I were asked to write the definition, which I wasn’t and can now take pot shots from afar like other do-nothing pundits, I would have left out the part about ingredients.  But that aside, the list of craft brewers would have remained the same as it is today.  Sort of … what about Boston Beer?

The United States brewing industry is really amazing when you look at what has happened across the globe to breweries and brewing cultures.  US beer consumers associate brewing tradition with German and England, among other European nations, and these two countries in particular have seen many of their famous breweries either be purchased by huge conglomerates such as InBev or go out of business.  Many young German and British folk see traditional lagers and ales as old fashioned and frumpy, putting pressure on breweries with awesome histories to move away from the beers that made them famous and profitable for centuries.

 This is not the case in the US.  Young consumers frequently identify with craft brewers and it is hip in many young circles to drink craft beer.  The “older” generations, say 30 years and older, also likes craft beer.  Take me as an example; I am 40 and have primarily consumed what is now called craft beer since I became a legal consumer of beer back in 1991.  A huge part of the US population has no first-hand knowledge of having a limited beer selection or that the selection of beer in the US absolutely sucked when the first microbreweries emerged in the early 1980’s.  Today we have a wonderful selection of great beers brewed by pub brewers, itsy-bitsy “nano brewers”, regional craft brewers (the breweries that were once called microbreweries until the pedantic overtone of the name stood in the way of maturation of this nascent movement) and nationally available craft beers from the larger regional brewers.  This is great for the US beer consumer and is also great for the US brewing industry as a whole.

Call me cold-hearted, a traitor or an old-fashioned capitalist.  I don’t care how big your brewery is or if you use corn, rice or sugar as a source of fermentables.  If the brewery brews really good beer, offers a variety of the great beers, buys raw materials from US farmers, buys some equipment from US producers, hires locals to run the brewery and keeps the earnings floating in the US economy, they are OK by me!