The news Sunday that Martyn Cornell has died was a gut punch. Friends filled Bluesky with small stories, including links to many of his blog posts. Rereading one of my favorites — “In which I give more badly written beer history a good kicking” — I couldn’t help but smile for a moment. It was a sentence after sentence takedown, and should have made any writer happy to have Martyn not review their work.
JUST WONDERING
ABI’s Years of Craft Strategy Whiplash Are Catching Up With It details Anheuser-Busch InBev’s failures over the years to sell enough beer that customers would rather drink than the ones their closer-to-home breweries back. In the story, Dave Infante mentions “big craft” (which he puts in quotation marks). If I read it correctly, I think he means “craft-like” (my quotation marks) beer from breweries that do not meet the Brewers Association’s definition of craft brewery.
Which I think is different than the big craft Alan McLeod has been referring to for at least a dozen years (scroll to page 7). McLeod might correct me, but he has been referring to breweries such at Sierra Nevada (1.1 million barrels produced in 2024), and perhaps even ones such as Fiddlehead Brewing (108,143 barrels).
This raises several questions. ABI big craft, after all, is made up of breweries that used to qualify to be members of the Brewers Association. How is Goose Island pre-2011 different than Goose Island today? Do they have more in common with ABI or Fiddlehead? More important to me, personally, as a brewery visitor, does Sierra Nevada have more in common with the ABI group as a group or with Liquid Mechanics Brewing (1,369 barrels) in Lafayette, Colorado, where I had a terrific Helles Friday afternoon?
Forty years ago, Vince Cottone, a beer columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who contributed to numerous publications, first used the phrases craft-brewing scene, craft brewery and craft brewing in the manner they are thought of today.
Cottone did not include the word craft beer in 1984 when he wrote an article headlined “Craft Brewing Comes of Age” for New Brewer magazine, a publication for members of the Institute of Brewing Studies. He also did not offer any definitions.
He provided those in the “Good Beer Guide: Breweries and Pubs of the Pacific Northwest,” published in 1986. He wrote: “I 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. I refer to this beer as True Beer, a detailed definition and description of which appears in the following section.”
The details included a discussion of the ingredients and process that resulted in a True Beer. He explained when and why he thought adjuncts were suitable, the role of finings, filtration and pasteurization. He admitted the last was the most controversial. “Pasteurization damages beer flavor. Period,” he wrote. “If it is minimal and carefully done, the damage may be slight, but all too often it results in unpleasant cooked flavor, usually coupled with some degree of oxidation.”
Ultimately, True Beer described “the ideal, uncompromised beer, beer that’s hand-made locally in small batches using quality natural ingredients, served on draft fresh and unpasteurized. It’s not a new kind of beer, even in North America.”
That’s what I had to drink Friday afternoon.
Finally, in 1997 Fred Eckhardt talked to industry members for a 1997 column that appeared in All About Beer magazine, asking the question, What is craft beer? Greg Noonan at Vermont Pub & Brewery told him, “I wish Vince Cottone had trademarked the term.”
Maybe McLeod should have trademarked “Big Craft.”
LEDE OF THE WEEK
Toddlers are climbing a plastic slide in the middle of a gigantic sandbox at Almanac Adventureland in Alameda, their parents slurping frosé at picnic tables nearby. Indoors, kids are springing up and down in a bouncy house, while adolescents are frantically twitching their wrists at the pinball machines.
If it weren’t for all the stainless-steel beer tanks, you might think this is Chuck E. Cheese, not a brewery.
“We don’t view Almanac as a craft brewery anymore,” said Damian Fagan, CEO of what was formerly known as Almanac Beer Co. “Those days have gone.”
From The Bay Area’s geekiest craft brewery distanced itself from beer. It’s never been more popular.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“I’m kind of stunned, actually. I had no idea this was going to be the way it would go. My thought at the time was maybe there’d be two or three breweries in town, and I’d be one of them and I’d have a personal watering hole where I could go, but it got much bigger than that.”
— Oscar Wong
From A city pays tribute to the ‘Godfather of Asheville Craft Beer.’ The Highland Brewing founder died May 25. More about this impact below.
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I’d have to have had a trade to which to attach the mark, Stan! I’m all about giving it all away but that’s a misuse by any measure. “Crafty” was the term over a decade ago for big beer dabbling and posing as micro. “Big craft” is the opposite, craft aspiring to generally infeasible scale. To be fair, a few have succeeded – but many others have been bought, been bought and shut or lost their way all by themselves. See BrewDog for example of that last class. What Infante describes is not big craft.
You are the lawyer, and know better what can be marked. I understand what Infante is describing is different. I would not like for that to be the new definition, which is why I linked to the long list of your posts.
Thanks for being my personal archivist at least on that one quip!
This way you know at least two of us are paying attention.
To my mind I do still see Sierra Nevada as craft based on the engagement with the North Carolina community. I know they will produce more in a day than I will in a year, but it’s the mindset that matters.
Agreed. This also prompted a question I often think about (and should quit, because I don’t have an answer). More than a decade before ABI began buying up “craft breweries” they introduced products designed to compete with beers from those breweries. They weren’t as interesting. Why?