Fallacy of "Craft" Status

One of the thousands of questions that Hoptopia tweets every day caught my attention recently. He asked whether Sam Adams should limit production to less than 2m barrels a year to keep their "craft" status. My answer was an off-the-cuff swipe at the label "craft", but I've had time to decide why I really think craft-credentials leave a sour taste.

Other bloggers have made the point that defining "craft" by volume of beer produced is meaningless. That's a dead horse I have no desire to interfere with.

The Brewers Association of America defines craft beer in a little more detail. It must be: a. small (<2m barrels/year), b. independent (at least 75%-owned by brewers themselves), and c. traditional (mostly malt and limited adjuncts). It's a decent set of criteria, made all the more critical because "craft" brewers get tax cuts as well as cache.

"Small" beers are big business in America (worth $7bn in 2009!), so defining the "craft" credential is heavily political. Result: a word that is supposed to distinguish caring producers of beer for whom profit is a secondary consideration, from bottom-line-obsessed factory-brewers, is now ironically a fiscal concept. A brief consideration of how the orange juice industry mangled the terms "pure" and "fresh" tells us that this ends badly.

So why the hell do we need these credentials in the first place?

As with any credential, "craft" is a proxy for trust in the absence of full disclosure. What that crap sentence means is that most of the beers we drink are brewed by people we don't know, who live far away, and for all we know might be evil, evil bastards. How do we know they are using fresh ingredients and sending us their "good stuff"? How do we know we're liking the right drinks?! How can we trust them to play fair?

These questions would keep us up all night if we hadn't come up with the ingenious plan of appointing referees and trusting them to set standards so we don't have to take the effort to do our own research.

Of course, none of this mattered back when beer was made either in your kitchen, by a neighbour, or worst-case scenario in the next village along. Nowadays, we're almost all guilty of an insatiable appetite for new experiences, and of hyping up hard-to-find and exotic beers to the point that locally-available fare can seem, well, a bit tame.

The best and only truly reliable way to know if you're drinking craft beer is to make it yourself, or buy it from a local brewer whose methods you can observe firsthand. Craft describes not only the production process, but also the relationship of the maker to the drinker. As with most relationships, it's a difficult one to maintain faithfully over long-distances...

Of course, your next best option is get in touch with a beer blogger who lives where the beer you want to drink is made. Beer bloggers are intelligent, honest, and absolutely never evil. Now all we need is a Beer Blogger's Association to certify that....

Review: Howe Sound Bailout Bitter

Along with my first review must come a caveat: I generally hate beer reviews. Not that a beer review cannot be as lively and mouth-watering as the beer it references. I'm tainted by the BeerAdvocate experience. BA is an excellent source of opinion and discussion which I refer to daily (I only feel comfortable criticizing a small aspect of BA because it is overall my favourite beer web-resource). And I respect the (superior) experience of most BA members — and their forums show what a wealth of knowledge and passion they have.

But the review system prompts you to choose a score of 1-5 for multiple characteristisc: appearance, smell, taste, mouthfeel, drinkability (ASTMD) — each of which are weighted to give a total mark out of 5 which translates to a final letter grade. Reviewers must also offer a written report of the beer. Multiple choice? Written report? Letter grades? IT'S BEER SCHOOL!

The ASTMD system tends to encourage people to stick to these criteria when describing the beer. This results in mostly boring reviews that go like this:

A: quite lovely, a shimmering orange blossom yellow with amber highlights
S: quite heavenly, a blooming blossom of shimmering suds
T: quite stunning, a caressing highlight of shimmering tastefulness
M: quite sensuous, a blossoming shimmer of caring backrubs
D: not bad

The result is you get a fairly helpful overall grade, which at least helps you to sort promising brews from likely stinkers — unless you are cynical enough to believe that the weight of prior "A"s and "A+"s in any way affects subsequent reviewers' grades ("Oh god I didn't like this beer but Beernut9000 and Hoppywaggle_USA both gave it "A"s, there must be something wrong with my mouth!"). But you have to trawl through crappy report cards until you find a gem of writing that draws on experiences outside the ASTMD spectrum to evaluate the drink.

I have my favourite beer reviewers (some of whom even stick to the ASTMD format — but whose opinions are so astute they mirror my own...), but the reviews that really affect me and get me excited about a beer come from friends, or BAs whose writing and charm convince me to try a beer far more than an esoteric list of "flavour notes" wrung from the cultured tongue of a would-be aficionado. I wish they all had blogs instead...

Shit why would I build up expectations like this then post my own beer review? I have much to learn about blog strategy...


(image from Ruth and Dave's photostream. I have no idea if they ripped it off from someone else, but it's a nice picture)

Now and again a beer comes along that you feel you could settle down with for good. Fill a liter-sized sippy cup with Howe Sound's Bailout Bitter and wheel me off to the retirement home, please.

Gimmicky the label is, but it made me chuckle and buy a bottle out of curiosity's sake. And truth be told I've always been attracted to beers that come in vessels bigger than my head. Though Bailout comes with a Grolsch-esque reusable stopper, I've yet to actually use it - and neither will you.

It pours light for a bitter, but my idea of bitter is forever tainted by the murky-brown pints of John Smith's and Webster's ubiquitous to British pubs in the 90s. Bailout is a frosted, honeyed gold, with a lively effervescence as it slides into the pint glass (hehe - I couldn't resist).

The aroma hits with a fresh blast of yeast and hops, zesty and uncomplicated. Upon raising the glass hints of hefeweizen-style citrus burst under your nose.

The beer is immediately refreshing. It is tartly bitter yet clean, with perfectly judged hops for its modest strength. The body is round enough to be pleasing, yet never bold or committal. Its biggest charm is its ability to enliven at every sip and never grow tiresome.

While not a great beer in the sense of having unmistakable character, this is comfort-brewing at its best. For me, cracking one open is like putting Goodfellas into the DVD player, or opening a worn Bukowski novel. A reliably satisfying experience.