The terms craft beer and craft brewery are common parlance when talking about the modern-day American beer industry. Yet despite their common use and seemingly universal acceptance the meaning of the term craft is one that is often discussed and debated.  I’d like to contribute my two cents to the debate but before I do so let’s look at the origins of the term with respect to the American beer industry.

When was the term craft first used relation to beer in the United States? And who coined the term? While there is no definitive answer to this question much of the good money seems to be placed on Vince Cottone. Cottone introduced the term craft in the mid-1980s. In his 1986 book Good Beer Guide: Brewers and Pubs of the Pacific Northwest (which I just purchased) Cottone  wrote that “I use the term Craft Brewery to describe a small brewery using traditional methods and ingredients to produce a handcrafted, uncompromised beer that is marketed locally. I refer to this beer as True Beer.” True Beer – now there’s an interesting choice of words. To Cottone True Beer is defined as “the ideal, uncompromised beer, beer that’s hand-made locally in small batches using quality natural ingredients, served on draft fresh and unpasteurized.” Interestingly, at the same time, the great beer guru Michael Jackson was using a different term to describe breweries that were producing alternatives to the beers being offered by the large-scale brewers. In his Pocket Guide to Beer, also published in 1986, Jackson made reference to boutique breweries. Meanwhile, up in Canada, our neighbors to the north were using the term cottage brewery.

Today, the term craft brewery has become synonymous with small-scale, independent, breweries that produce beer that is of higher quality and more flavorful than the large scale brewing companies such as Anhueser-Busch and MillerCoors. At the same time there is no legal definition of what constitutes craft beer or a craft brewery. This, of course, leaves the definition of craft to be defined by others. Enter, stage left, the Brewers Association.

The Brewers Association is the trade organization that represents the interests of craft brewers (as defined by them) in the United States. They define a craft brewery as one which is:

• Small – annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less,
• Independent – less than 25 percent of the craft brewery is owned or controlled (or equivalent economic interest) by an alcoholic beverage industry member that is not itself a craft brewer, and
• Traditional – a brewer that has a majority of its total beverage alcohol volume in beers whose flavor derives from traditional or innovative brewing ingredients and their fermentation. Flavored malt beverages (FMBs) are not considered beers.

For many this definition has become the standard accepted definition of a craft brewery. I have even used this definition in my own research on the industry. Getting to define the term craft means that you also get to change the definition of craft. And the Brewers Association has done this twice in recent years. In 2010 the Association raised the maximum brewing threshold from two million to six million barrels per year. This brought the Boston Beer Company into the Association’s fold. In 2014 the Association further modified its definition of craft to allow brewers who used adjuncts such as corn and rice to produce their beer. This allowed the association to now include brewers such as D.G. Yuengling & Son.

The debate over the use of adjuncts generated some controversy in 2010 when the Brewers Association published a list of thirty-four domestic brewers that failed to meet their criteria for a craft brewer. The list included breweries that were disqualified based on the fact that they were “adjunct brewers”. One of the brewers on the list took the Brewers Association to task over their appearance on the list. August Schell Brewing Company of New Ulm, MN issued a statement condemning the Brewers Association definition of craft. They noted that their brewery was 152 years old and was the second oldest family-owned brewery in the United States. Schell accused the Brewers Association of being insensitive to the historical context of breweries like August Schell. They pointed out that when the brewery was opened in New Ulm in 1860 it would have been impractical for the brewery’s founder August Schell to import sufficient amounts of the high quality, two-row malting barley that he had used back in his native Germany. So, instead, they used locally-grown 6-row barley. The local barley’s protein content was too high which resulted in Schell adding corn in order to produce the desired beer. Thus Schell did not use corn as a cost-cutting measure, or as a way to deliberately reduce the quality of his beer, but rather as mechanism to produce the beer with the desired flavor and color. When two-row barley later became available Schell continued to use some corn in their recipes partly because they had a loyal customer base that approved of their beer and partly as a nod to tradition. Schell suggested that for the Brewers Association to exclude brewers like themselves was disrespectful, rude, and embarrassing. It is worth noting that the Brewers Association has ceased the practice of listing breweries that do not meet their definition of craft, instead listing those that do. The points raised by Schell are well articulated and have considerable merit. I also give kudos to the Brewers Association for changing their definition to accommodate Schell and other breweries like them.

It is worth noting that not every country shares our definition of a craft brewery. In Europe a microbrewery (they do not use the term craft) is defined by the Brewers of Europe as one which brews no more than 1,000 hectoliters (852 barrels) of beer per year. The Craft Beer Industry Association of Australia defines a craft brewery as one producing less than 40 million liters (341 barrels) of beer per year. Both of these definitions are significantly smaller than the Brewers Association’s annual production threshold of 6 million barrels. However, one needs to be aware of the fact that Brewers Association does have a definition of a microbrewery – that is a brewery producing less than 17,600 hectoliters (15,000 barrels) of beer per year.

But as the old idiom says, there is more than one way to skin a cat. And so there is more than one way to approach the meaning of craft. Before doing so, however, let’s return to the Brewers Association’s definition of craft for a moment. The Brewers Association defines craft brewery but not craft beer. This of course muddies the waters and opens up the possibility that a non-craft brewery could produce craft beer while beer produced by a craft brewery may not be craft beer.  I guess that has the potential to open up a whole new can of worms,

But let’s move on to look at alternative ways to arrive at a definition of craft. While it appears to be standard practice, in most countries,  to let trade groups define the terms craft breweries and craft beer there are other ways to approach the issue. We could, for example, ask the craft beer consumers themselves. This is exactly the approach taken by Carlos Gomez-Corona (Gomez-Corona? – what a great name for someone studying the Mexican beer industry) and some of his colleagues from the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana. In a 2016 study published in the journal Apetite  they asked Mexican craft beer drinkers how they defined craft beer. Their findings were interesting. To summarize, Mexican craft beer drinkers define a craft beer as one that is produced on a small scale, is “carefully” produced, is “prepared traditionally”,  but sometimes uses “different” ingredients that results in a beer that has a more “original” or “unique” flavor. A recent survey by the market research form Nielsen asked drinkers of alcoholic beverages what the term craft beer meant to them. The three most common responses were – beer that comes from a small, independent company (56% of people surveyed), beer that is brewed as part of a small batch (50%), and beer that is handcrafted (43%). Interestingly enough there were differences between men and women as to what constituted craft. Women were more likely to associate the term with products that are handcrafted (47% vs 41%), while men were more likely to associate the term with small batch production (54% vs 45%).

The reference to craft beer being “carefully” produced reminds me of the documentary Beer Wars. Towards the end of the fall semester I showed Beer Wars to the students in my Industrial Geography class. At one point during the documentary Greg Koch, CEO of Stone Brewing Company, is interviewed and makes the statement that “I do not care how much beer we make. I only care how we make it”.  In a recent article on the BBC website Peter Day, talking about craft breweries in the United Kingdom, suggested that “craftspeople like what they do with their hands and their brains, and that is a very important part of how they do it”. So perhaps the term craft implies something about the way the beer is made and the enjoyment that brewers derive from making it. So we now arrive at another way of approaching the question of how to define craft – and that is to ask the brewers themselves.

In an article that appeared in the Journal of Consumer Culture Colin Campbell of the University of York examines the meaning of the term craft. According to Campbell “the craft producer is someone who exercises personal control over all the processes involved in the manufacture of the good in question. Hence, the craft worker is someone who chooses the design for the product, selects the materials needed and generally personally makes (or at least directly supervises the making of) the object in question. Thus, one may say that the craft producer is one who invests his or her personality or self into the object produced”. Personally, I like Campbell’s definition. I believe that it is accurately represents what is happening in thousands of small scale craft breweries across the world. Interviews of craft brewers in England by Thomas Thurnell-Read  support Campbell’s ideas. The brewers interviewed by Thurnell-Read emphasized the “hands-on, practical, nature of brewing” and the “merits and enjoyments inherent in the activity of brewing” and the” satisfaction from hands-on manual production.”

Recently a new term appeared on the scene – indie beer.  As far as I can tell the term first appeared in an article in Time Magazine in 2013. However it was not until more recently that the term was expounded upon in some detail.  In a provocatively titled piece, Craft is Dead, Drink Indie Beer, Greg Parker (Founder of Iron Horse Brewery in Ellenburg, WA) argues that the term indie, rather than craft, is a more accurate representation of what small independent breweries are doing. To Parker the term indie is about attitude – “Indie implies a bit of a could-give-a-shit view of what is practical, popular and wise . . .  Indie is not corporate, it’s not large, it’s not driven by profits. Indie is independent, connected, risky and beholden to an ideology of doing it our way and driven by finding better and more interesting outcomes.” A problem with the term craft, according to Parker, is that it is being  increasingly co-opted by large brewers such as Anheuser-Busch in their struggle to maintain market share – witness A-B’s purchase of craft breweries and their production of crafty beers such as Shock Top. In February 2016, 10 Barrel Brewing (who are owned by Anheuser-Busch) were granted a neighborhood use permit to establish a facility in San Diego’s East Village neighborhood. The prospect of 10 Barrel coming to San Diego provoked a strongly worded response from the San Diego Brewers Guild who issued a statement that said “10 Barrel seeks to deceptively communicate itself as being part of the locally grown marketplace and leverage its resources and size as a corporation to compete against and ultimately harm the true local brewers and disrupt the market.” The apparent muddying of the craft waters prompted one commentator, and another advocate of the term indie, to ask “Is craft beer even a thing any more, or is it just marketing?” Others have suggested that the term craft “might be losing relevance” and according to Guinness Brand Director Emma Giles we may be entering into a “post-craft era” with respect to beer.

So which is it? Boutique brewery, cottage brewery, or craft brewery?True beer, craft beer, or indie beer? To be honest I really do not have a good answer? Perhaps we should consider U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s approach to dealing with a tricky definition. In her now famous statement about the difficulty of defining hard core pornography Stewart remarked “I’ll know it when I see it”. Apply this to craft beer and it may simply be a case of “I’ll know it when I taste it”.

Further Reading:

Campbell, Colin. The craft consumer: Culture, craft and consumption in a postmodern society. Journal of Consumer Culture, Volume 5(1), Issue 1, pages 23–42.

Cottone, Vince. 1986. Good Beer Guide: Breweries and Pubs of the Pacific Northwest. Homestead Book Company: Seattle.

Gomez-Corona, Carlos,  Hector B. Escalona-Buendía, Mauricio García, Sylvie Chollet, and Dominique Valentin.  2016. Craft vs. industrial: Habits, attitudes and motivations towards beer
consumption in Mexico. Appetite, Volume96, pages 358-367.

Thurnell-Read, Thomas. 2014. Craft, tangibility and affect at work in a microbrewery. Emotion, Space and Society, Volume 13, pages 46-54.