The real problem is that the beer geek world is constantly searching to cram multiple attribute assessments into a single binary: Either it IS “craft beer,” and therefore worth drinking, or it IS NOT.
So the problem is with both the principle and the native semantics of the chosen name. There is disagreement among “good beer” drinkers over what metrics define the binary, as well as whether or not the idea of defining beer binarily makes sense, not to mention individual differences in taste that causes divides over whether a particular beer IS or IS NOT.
Then you have the semantic problem - “Craft” actually means something, and when you try to tag a noun with it, you more or less expect that it will continue to mean pretty much the same thing it did before. And so the arguments about production methods and barrels-per-year and multi-million-dollar ad campaigns begin. None of which are particularly relevant to the beer itself.
I would propose that instead of trying to conflate all of our myriad passions about beer into one slippery metric, we should instead think of a better, more complex model to define our world. A well-crafted model for more sophisticated mental palates, if you will.
If I were to take a stab at it, it would look something like this: There are brewing companies, brewers, and beer.
Starting with the premise that the beer comes first in all of this, let’s say that within beer, there is a subset called “Commodity Lager,” and another called “Good Beer.” In a Venn diagram, there would be some overlap between the two, and “Good Beer” would NOT encompass everything that is NOT “Commodity Lager.” In other words, there can be Commodity Lagers that can be considered good by virtue of being, well, the best of the worst (Heineken draft?) - and there can be beers that are not CL but also just not good.
So let’s say we have a Beer. We have decided it is a Good Beer, and not a Commodity Lager. The temptation now is to slip back into old patterns of thinking and call this a Craft Beer. I say don’t. Call it what it is. Call it Good Beer. Save “Craft” for the brewer, who is either the sort who constantly innovates for the purpose of crafting new beers, or the sort who is mainly focused on consistently producing the same beers over and over, flawlessly.
Brewing companies, often inextricable from brewers in our minds but very different entities, can come in all sizes. Large, Medium, and Small should be adequate descriptions. Throw in some descriptors for things like community involvement and corporate philosophy and we should start to see a workable language emerge. A bit of codification and we should be able to come up with some reasonably agreeable terms for the most common combinations.
Good god I’ve just run on at the mouth. Oh well, feel free to ignore me.
