For a week now, I’ve been pounding the keyboard in an attempt to answer the question in the headline. No 700-word column should take this long, but occasionally, exploring a concept as nebulous as this will bend my mind into a pretzel, dissolving any enthusiasm I once had for the task.
It seems like a simple question: “What is craft beer?”
The answer might seem simple to you, dear reader. Throw out some words like “local,” “hops”, and “pine needles” and you might think you have the answer. But you don’t. And now that you’ve started thinking about it, it’ll gnaw at you…
Or, maybe you’re of superior intelligence and have the perfect answer, which will put an end to any barroom discussions among beer fans and brewers, or to any stories in Time Magazine outlining this very issue.
If you do, you should really go talk to Ken Beattie, executive director of the BC Craft Beer Guild (BCBG), because even he’s been pounding the keyboard trying to cobble a definition together. The BC government has asked the guild for a definition, and he’s been working on this project with brewers and provincial policy makers for quite some time. They’ve submitted a tentative definition t the government, which Beattie understandably won’t share because it’s still a work in progress.
The problem with defining “craft beer” is that the term doesn’t actually mean anything. It grew out of “microbrew” – a term defined by the amount of beer produced – supposedly to differentiate brewers relying on quality products to drive business and brewers selling shit lager to turn a profit.
As Matt Phillips, founder of Phillip’s Brewing, explains,“If you’re putting out stuff because there’s a market study that says there’s a big demand for Beer X, then…” he scoffs noisily, adding, “I don’t know too many craft brewers that do it, let’s put it that way. We’re not that smart.”
It’s a similar argument as why Radiohead’s considered art but Nickelback isn’t. It’s a philosophical discussion, really. It’s intangible. Don Moore, western sales specialist for Canada Malting, who’s worked in the beer industry nearly three decades, says it’s really about the soul of the brewery (and the company behind it). He actually uses that word: Soul.
“It’s about how the brewer approaches their art,” Moore says. “Just because a brewery is large, I don’t think that it should exclude them from being a craft brewer.”
He cites Sierra Nevada Brewing as an example. The California-based company brews a million barrels every year, but they value taste and quality before anything else.
Which means craft beer is that which is driven by a brewery’s devotion to quality first, business second. But this makes for a rather flimsy official definition that no governing body – especially the provincial government – would accept.
There are other factors to consider. In order to join the BCBG, a brewery must be majority owned in B.C.; the money and the jobs must remain in BC; and the amount produced must not exceed 160,000 hectolitres per year.
But, again, these points don’t a craft beer make. Unlike the term “mircobrew,” craft beer isn’t defined explicitly by its output. Again, look at Sierra Nevada. In BC, the 160,000 hectolitres is a guideline imposed by the provincial government (of course!) for tax purposes.
Corporate or foreign ownership is a red herring as well. Granville Island Brewing is owned and operated by Molson Coors and functions for the most part as a macro brewery when mass-producing its pale ale and lager (among others). But Vern Lambourne, GIB’s brewmaster, also creates legitimate and well-regarded craft beers with its Under the Bridge and Black Notebook series.
In the US, Blue Moon, owned by MillerCoors (a joint venture between Molson Coors and SABMiller), and Shock Top, owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev, are considered “crafty” because they’re brewed in “traditional” craft beer fashion – but any beer drinker worth his barley knows these beers are produced to target an increasing percentage of the beer-swilling public and are, in fact, actually quite shitty.
All this to say I don’t envy the BCBG in any way, and I wish Beattie and his troops all the best in coming up with a definition that takes all this into account. I, on the other hand, am done twisting my mind into pretzels over this and…well, now that I mention it, have a craving for real life pretzels that must be satiated immediately.
