There is nothing slacker than a blogger blogging about what another blog is blogging about. But I am compelled this weekend by the advance in thought about "craft beer" that Lew Bryson has, characteristically, trigged and Stonch has expanded upon in relation to UK brewing. Just as Hobbes's Leviathan has that mid-book chapter that summarizes everything and so is the better point of entry, so too has Lew provided a very useful summary at about comment 38:
We're getting some divergent ideas of what "craft beer" means.While I am happy to have entered into the discussion about beer in the way A Good Beer Blog and your reading and commenting allows, I am still in many ways at a loss as to what it is I am doing. Some days I wake up and think "what am I going to do for beer today" as I try to think about a topic for the next post. Other days I think this is all a huge waste of time and a cover for a problem. But, still, there is that thing, that discussion happening about the product of people who work a craft in the way that sets it apart - it is not an industry at a certain level - and that is what compels. There is an exchange of craft for value that is like the art on my walls or the organic farmer's way. And its product is both an end and a means: at its best a refined and delicate consumable product as well as an opportunity for conviviality, an anti-snobbish agency that is also transferred with the ale or lager that can improve one's life as part of a larger genial community if you let it. And that second bit is actually free.A different kind of beer.I like Sid's UK view of "no craft, no macro," just "micro" and "brewery," based loosely on size, but it doesn't address the beer...which is probably more a reflection of the wider variety of beer that's always been available in the UK.
A different kind of brewery.
A different kind of brewing process.
A beer-centered social movement.
A different brewer's perspective.There's life in this discussion, still.
How do you capture all that in a descriptor? Can you expect it to be all bound up in one phrase?
Comments
Stan Hieronymus - June 24, 2007 2:15 PM
Can you expect it to be all bound up in one phrase?
No.
6th Floor Blogger - June 26, 2007 4:36 PM
I always think of Craft Beers as semi-unique in some way. The way a chef would think, "I wonder how this dish would taste if i added ____" They're experimenting and trying new things, because they enjoy it.
Stan Hieronymus - June 26, 2007 6:13 PM
So would Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or Sam Adams Boston Lager or some other flagship beer that's been produced 10 years or more fit in?
hiikeeba - June 27, 2007 5:23 PM
Craft beer is always hard to define. Could Blue Moon be craft? How about Stonebridge? Big brewers make them, so does that automatically mean they aren't craft beer? Or is anything other than pale yellow fizzy water craft beer?
Craft beer is a hoity toity way to refer to microbrewery beer. The only way I could see using the term is if the brewer grows the grain and malts it for his beer, grows his own hops, and manages his own yeast strain.