Is Craft Beer Just a Perception?

Recent years has seen a cultural shift from mass produced generic beer to craft beers. Millennials have gravitated towards products that are labeled as "authentic", "craft", and "local". This cultural shift can be seen in the beer industry as well as coffee and other various consumer products. And since this rising trend started, large corporations have attempted to jump on the bandwagon and penetrate this growing market. Passionate consumers are in a rage that large corporations are taking words like "bespoke", "craft", and "artisan" and slapping them on their products in an attempt to appeal to this new wave of consumers. This is damn near sacrilege to most consumers looking for a true authentic product. How dare corporate giants claim to be "artisan" when they clearly do not put personal care into each individual batch of products using only the highest ingredients. How many words are going to be bastardized and mutilated by corporations just to earn a quick profit? Hamilton Nolan's article makes a good point on the marketing extortion of the word "bespoke".

But why can corporations get away with this? In all honesty I believe it's because of the hazy definitions of these words. Or at the very least companies can make an argument that their products fall into these "artisan" and "craft" categories because of their new unusual flavors or extra ingredients not added to past products.

flickr image by Mike

So how does this affect the beer industry and how is a beer defined as a "craft beer"? According to the Brewers Association craft beer is defined by 3 attributions; small, independent, and traditional.

Small
Annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less (approximately 3 percent of U.S. annual sales). Beer production is attributed to the rules of alternating proprietorship.

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.

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.

But are these requirements really necessary to be a craft brew, or have we deviated from the traditional meaning of the word craft? The word craft is of Germanic origin and means "an activity involving skill in making things by hand", among other definitions. How do we judge how much skill is necessary during the beer making process to brand the beer as craft? No one can really say because it's so subjective. But I'd say the entire beer making process takes skill and knowledge. I wouldn't be able to read a book about the brewing process go home that night and make a good batch of beer.

Certain advertised craft beers such as Blue Moon and Shock Top are not actually craft as defined by the Brewers Association because their parent companies, MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch respectively, are too large to fulfill the small size requirement. But the size of the company doesn't detract from the quality their beer. Tom Long, the CEO of MillerCoors, stated in an opinion piece to CNN "We respect the fact that some of our fellow brewers would want to differentiate themselves, but we're convinced that the ultimate assessment of our beers will not come from an industry organization, but instead from America's beer drinkers." I agree and believe that the size of the company shouldn't dictate if a beer is craft.

So what about being independent? Every beer is produced to have a specific quality to it whether it's a light beer, dark beer, ale, porter or IPA. The process of brewing is a craft in and of itself, so I believe that anyone who brews regardless of being independent can produce craft beers. So with all these requirements thrown out the window and by the definition of craft every beer is technically a craft beer. But what makes certain beers more special? PERCEPTION. "Craft beer" is a perception held in the mind of consumers and nothing more.