by Alyssa Pereira
Not all beers are made equal. That much is made apparent in a walk through any local market anywhere in the US.
The majority of beer sections in American grocery stores and neighborhood bodegas aren鈥檛 exactly artisan creations. Rather, they鈥檙e mass-produced, packaged, and sold by one of just a few international beverage conglomerates.
But alongside them, if you look carefully, you鈥檒l often see in smaller quantities the special, slightly more expensive, locally made beers. Like mass-made macro brews, these beers are also created with your typical beer ingredients: malts, hops, yeast, and water. But unlike the macros, they get to utilize the designation craft.
The fight to claim the term craft as it relates to beer has been brewing for several decades. Here鈥檚 why.
黑料网 is craft beer?
Beer is an alcoholic beverage made by brewing and fermentation from malted barley, oats, or other grains, and flavored with hops (or ) for added taste. Generally speaking, a craft is “an art or trade that requires a special, usually manual skill.” The term has evolved into an adjective to describe a food or beverage made with such abilities. It’s an old term, first recorded before the year 900 and stemming from the Old English 肠谤忙蹿迟听(鈥渟trength, skill鈥�) and related to the German Kraft.
The compounded term craft beer was in the mid-1980s. Around this time, microbreweries were proliferating around the United States, and the success of their products was beginning to challenge large alcohol conglomerates like Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors for refrigerator space in consumer grocery stores.
In 1987, in a guide book to breweries of the Pacific Northwest, Cottone explained his reasoning for selecting the word craft to describe such career zymurgists, writing, 鈥淚 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.鈥�
The phrase caught on quickly, popping up in industry trade magazines and at conferences, eventually making its way into the title of the annual Craft Brewers Conference in 1996, a yearly gathering of American artisan brewers. By the end of that decade, the Institute of Brewing Studies鈥� which eventually was absorbed into today鈥檚 dominant brewing industry trade group, the Brewers Association鈥攆ormalized a definition of craft beer.
This mid-90s description required that a craft brewer must meet four criteria. They must:
- have a federal brewer鈥檚 notice鈥攁 license to brew beer;
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only sell beer made with less than 10% adjuncts (such as fruit, chocolate, coffee, or other non-traditional beer ingredients);
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not use artificial ingredients;
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and not be more than 30% owned by a large macro brewery.
Such a definition helped to guide the explosive growth of craft beer. Newly popular styles like the bitter, hoppy India Pale Ale, the boozy, viscous bourbon barrel-aged stout, and the mixed-fermentation ale鈥攎ore commonly referred to as sours鈥攂egan to rapidly gain traction with drinkers. Over the next couple decades, these novel drinks would help the craft beer industry flourish.
黑料网 beer听earns the craft label today?
In today鈥檚 use, craft is still no arbitrary label in the beer world. While some large companies attempt to masquerade their mass-made beers as “craft鈥� offerings, small brewers continue to crusade to promote beers made by small and independently owned companies. As a result, craft remains a vigorously defended title, defined and redefined annually by the Brewers Association, the trade group composed of and self-governed by brewers and brewery owners all over the country.
By , craft brewers must be the following:
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Small: A craft brewery may produce 鈥渟ix million barrels of beer per year鈥� or less.
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Independent: 鈥淟ess than 25 percent of the craft brewery is owned or controlled (or equivalent economic interest) by a beverage alcohol industry member that is not itself a craft brewer.鈥�
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Traditional: A craft brewery鈥檚 output must primarily be beer. In other words, no hard seltzer companies allowed.
In short, craft brewers produce beer in small batches, and sell it to locals in a given community, town, city, or region. But not always.
Over the last decade or so, massive brewing companies have bought a series of small brewing companies and bolstered their production and distribution so as to sell their beer nationwide under the guise of being craft-like. While these beers are actually no longer craft by BA definitions, they .
The term听craft has become so popular, its use has spilled into other areas of gastronomy as a catch-all adjective to express that something was handmade or produced with precision in a small quantity. Since the emergence of craft beer, craft cocktails, coffee, and chocolate have .
But it all started with the popularity of beer. And these days, the drink is more popular than ever, with most Americans living within 10 miles of an independent craft brewery, according to the Brewers Association. That鈥檚 a lot of delicious, skillfully made beer to go around. Bottoms up!
Alyssa Pereira is a freelance writer in San Francisco, California. Her work has been featured on SFGate.com, SPIN Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Paper, Vice, and others.
We hope you enjoy your drinks (whether craft beer or not) responsibly, otherwise you’ll be fair game to be called one of these many synonyms for drunkard.
