Last week I had the opportunity to visit two breweries in Chicago – Lagunitas Brewing Company and Vice District Brewing Company. Both breweries are recent additions to the city’s brewing landscape, having opened their doors in 2014. Both are classified as craft breweries by The Brewers Association, the trade association that represents the interests of American craft brewers. According to the Brewers Association one of the criteria that a brewery must meet in order to be considered craft is that it brew less than six million barrels of beer a year. The Chicago facility is Lagunitas’ second brewery in the United States. The first is located in Petaluma, California and was opened in 1993. By the end of the current decade Lagunitas anticipates brewing 1.4 million barrels of beer annually at its two breweries. It is the fifth largest craft brewery in the United States.  In sharp contrast Vice District brews between 500 and 600 barrels of beer per year. In all likelihood it will still be producing the same amount of beer in five years time. If you do the math Laginitas will produce approximately 2,500 times more beer than Vice District. Yet they are both considered craft breweries. This was my first time visiting a large craft brewery. I was amazed at its size. Their 250 barrel brewing system gave the facility a non-craft feel (to me at least). Everywhere you turned there were huge fermentation tanks. The closest I got to Tony Magee (Lagunitas’ founder) was purchasing a copy of his book So You Want to Start A Brewery? The Lagunitas Story in the brewery gift store. My visit to Vice District an hour or so later was quite different. They have a seven barrel brewing system.  When I arrived Quintin Cole and Curtis Tarver, Vice District’s co-owners, were on site, Both were running back and forth serving beer, posing for photographs, and joking with customers. It was small, intimate, and fun. While Lagunitas has been hugely successful and brews fantastic beers that are available in over 45 states I reflected on the fact that Vice District is the more typical face of the American craft beer industry – 70%,of American craft breweries produce under one thousand barrels of beer per year. I can’t buy their beer here in Ohio. But that is part of the appeal of a brewery like Vice District – visiting the establishment, shaking hands with the owners, and enjoying a beer that may not be available anywhere else on the face of the Earth.