If you have it in you to consider another 2,000-plus words on the subject, “craft brewers as authors” at Ken and Dots Allsorts provokes a few thoughts. Like with Boak & Bailey’s Ten signs of a craft brewery, Ken chooses to criteria other than size and doesn’t try to do the impossible, which would be to make quality part of the definition.
Bottom line:
I think we should understand the relationship between craft brewers and the beer they produce on the model of the relationship between authors and their works. That is, we should see craft brewers as authors. The relevant characteristic of authors for the purposes of this comparison is that authors have a large degree of control over and responsibility for the ultimate form of their work. But there’s more to it. Because the ultimate form of the work is very much their decision, they have a lot personally invested in it. An author wants to write popular books, but they want that to happen because people like the books they write rather than because they research what people already want and write something like that.
This makes it relatively easy to explain (at least to me) why a brewery can be quite large and still make beer the man or woman on the street will call craft.
In other words, what matters for craft beer is the organisational structure of the brewery. This is not a question of absolute number of employees. . . . but the more people there are, the less likely it is that anyone will stand in a properly authorial relationship to the work produced. This is why craft breweries tend to be small, because as breweries get bigger they lose that relationship. Size is a matter of organisational structure.
I like that phrase, authorial relationship to the work produced. Although my view of who contributes to the authorial process might be broader that yours. I’m inclined to give creative credit to more than just the guy who writes the recipes.
Perhaps I also find it easier to find “proper” authorial relationships (honestly, I don’t know), and thus to understand why a single tank at Sierra Nevada Brewing may contain as much beer as the average brewpub makes in a year — and the ones at New Belgium are even bigger. (Got more time? Read SF Weekly on the The Artisanal Irony: The Mass-Produced Hand-Crafted Food Dilemma.)
Six years ago, after Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery invited a group of five other brewers (who Dick Cantwell of Elysian Brewing would then call the “Brett Pack”) to visit Belgium with him I sat in the middle of a roundtable discussion that ended up being a story in All About Beer Magazine. One of my questions was, “Can you still say the beers, the recipes, are your own as you become a larger brewing company?”
Rob Tod of Allagash Brewing answered, “As you business grows you have to have more good people making decisions. The problem with the big breweries is they may have great brewers but their company culture is to dumb down everything they do (to reach a broader audience).”
I want beers from a brewery where the people who work there don’t know any better, as opposed to those from a place where that know what doesn’t work.
And I think all of this aligns with a conclusion Ray Daniels seems to have come to recently during a series of tweets.
Granted, there is a danger of taking this too far, of turning everybody who touches a hop into a rock star (search for “rock stars” at a Good Beer Blog to see what Alan thinks of that) because beer has become part of the “artisan” movement. Joel Stein pointed this out brilliantly (in a slap-your-knee-while-you-laugh way) a while back in Los Angeles magazine.
First, we idiotically agreed to learn every chef’s name. Then every species of fish, every variety of apple, and every type of heirloom wheat. Now farm names—even those of the specific farmer—are expected cultural knowledge, edging out any chance for poets, painters, and people who rant in magazines about food trends. What will we have to memorize next—the names of the guys who pick our fruit? “Oh, Juan Hernandez picked the strawberries in the sorbet? He’s got a very delicate hand!”
In fact, we don’t need to know the name of every brewer (sorry, Jared) who has a hand in each batch produced at [fill in the name of the brewery of your choice]. But I like knowing they are there and that they are allowed to make a difference in the beer that ends up in my glass.
Speaking of authors when’s the hop book out?
Thanks for asking, Ed. Production should have a better answer next week (or perhaps that is wishful thinking). Right now the guess is end of November. I’m sure you know I am more anxious to see it in print than anybody ;>)
You have me thinking. I am trying to determine the relative importance of “taste-trust” compared to the water from the well. One thing that is not brought up in the “craft” discourse is the aspect of making much out of constrained resources. One of my favourite constrained resources in brewing is the quality of the well. Doctoring the water may make for harder or softer or more like Prague but I prefer when the beer has an aspect that is also sensed in the tap water. I don’t need a taste trust when I can trust the taste reflect what is in the well.
But it is like children – is it their DNA or what they can be taught? I like my craft to at least have some of the DNA of what is local showing. Anyone can be clever.
I’m going rogue here, because your title set me off a bit. Brewers are often compared to authors, artists, musicians–there’s a real cult of the artisan when it comes to craft beer. In a way, that’s fine. (In a way, it’s fantastic.) I think it does a disservice to the actual scope of brewing, which is 99% hard work with an enlivening dollop of creativity on top–we always seem to focus on the creative rather than the actual. And some of the breweries we most revere never come out with new beers.
But to the rogue part. It’s really irritating to me that brewers so often get tapped to be actual authors. Residing in their heads is often enormous insight into the brewing process and the art of developing new recipes. Almost never do the skills of writing reside there–or at least not to the degree they do in an actual writer. I don’t fool myself into thinking I could actually brew professionally, but we regularly offer valuable print columns up to brewers.
I think there’s ample veneration of brewers in the world; but please, let them stay brewers.
Not to mention that actual rock stars must get really really irritated by big talking craft brewers, too.
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Alan, Yes to local DNA, and water certainly is a good place to start. Just my opinion, but part of the job of the job of the person (or people, more accurately) responsible for what a beer tastes like is making sure the local character remains.
Jeff, I’m looking at it a little less literally than you, so the headline should have read “How brewers are like authors.” This was the key sentence for me: “An author wants to write popular books, but they want that to happen because people like the books they write rather than because they research what people already want and write something like that.”
I also think creativity can be part of process (the 99% hard work).
Probably off topic: What brewery isn’t coming out with new beers?
Thanks for picking up on the post and for your comments. I think we agree that the author might actually be a group of people who collaborate closely and contribute in different ways, ie more than just whoever writes the recipes. What’s crucial, I think, is really how responsibility for the final say is divvied out and how the decision is made. The part I would emphasise now is the suggestion that size, for determining what counts as a craft brewery, is a matter of organisational structure.
Agreed, Ken.
I think that breweries like Sierra Nevada and New Belgium (listed simply because they are among the biggest) are showing that it is possible to grow and maintain a structure conducive to craft.
And it might be part of the explanation why the larger breweries have struggled to produce beers that are considered craft.
“…determining what counts as a craft brewery, is a matter of organisational structure…”
With respect, that inherently is veering towards oxymoron.
Alan,
re: ‘veering towards oxymoron’, I’m not not following you. Size is a matter of organisational structure. Every brewery is an organisation. Every organisation has a structure. Some structures are more hierarchical than others. Other things being equal, craft breweries are less hiearchically structured than others.
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Jeff Alworth… I agree with you on the hardwork portion. Too often people looking in only see the finished product. Brewing and cooking are both craft endeavors (coming from the original meaning), similar to an artisan cabinet maker. In craft there are skills that must be learned and mastered. Only then can artistry come forth. Writing follows a similar pattern; we all have the same words, the same ingredients. It is how we use these that shows mastery of craft and artistic achievement.