Craft. Regional. Traditional. Mega. Multinational. Local.
What does it all mean.?
I want beer I enjoy drinking. Nothing weird in that. As long as a brewery provides beer I want to drink, I'll support them. In the most basic way: by buying their beer.
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Bock Beer in 1944 America
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In my current (ongoing) series on The Atlantic Brewery, which operated
breweries in the U.S. Southeast for about 20 years from 1954, the issue
came up inci...
7 hours ago
13 comments:
Ron , why not make the beer you want to drink ? It's not hard , and you can share it with friends , what could be better ?
Well, if only the breweries could figure that out!
"Craft. Regional. Traditional. Mega. Multinational. Local." To which I can add, "Gourmet and Boutique", two idiotic terms that are becoming really trendy among Latin American "Craft brewers, among others".
Some words, like, Micro, Regional, Macro, Multinational have some sense, as they sort of describe the size of the brewery, but that, as with any other label, doesn't automatically mean good beer....
"Some words, like, Micro, Regional, Macro, Multinational have some sense, as they sort of describe the size of the brewery, but that, as with any other label, doesn't automatically mean good beer...."
"Macro" and "Multinational" automatically mean bad beer, don't they?
I agree with the Filosof that terms roughly relating to size make a certain amount of sense, but I actually recognise only two categories - good and bad. And, like you, Ron, purchase accordingly.
Recently I had a draft Harp lager that a good natural beer taste. It was not a world-beater but was miles ahead of some craft beers. Recently when presented with a cloudy yellow brew that smelled strongly of grapefruit and pine, Id have much preferred to have the Harp.
In general, large breweries do not make the kind of beer I like but some do. Pilsener Urquell is one of the best lagers in the world. Blue Moon is a very decent white beer, so is Rickard's White Ale in Canada. Guinness FES needs no introduction here (or the SE version). Numerous large breweries make excellent real ale in England.
Breweries whether big or small need to make flavourful, balanced, stable beers and that is not as easy a trick as one might imagine.
Gary
Right! Brewery size has nothing to do with beer quality. I would certainly disagree that 'macro' automatically means bad...especially now that the macros are beginning to take note of the more adventurous consumer palate (and many micros seem obsessed with bombarding the palate to unheard of extremes).
Some of the newer macro efforts are not bad at all. And let's not forget the micros that have become macros and managed to keep making very good beer.
Like Rod suggests above, there are only two kinds of beer--good and bad-- and there's plenty of both coming from brewers both big and small. It's just a matter of wading through the glut of product on the retail shelves these days to find the ones one really likes. Ahhhh. the agony of choice.
Gary -
"Breweries whether big or small need to make flavourful, balanced, stable beers and that is not as easy a trick as one might imagine."
No, the depresing thing is that good beer isn't that hard to make (every little farmhouse brewery in Franken manages very well) so long as your aim is to make good beer at a reasonable level of profit. It becomes difficult when accountants start running the show, and the whole aim is to maximise profit. The brewers lose control and the cart starts driving the horse.
You say, correctly, that Pilsner Urquell is a good beer - well, it used to be a damn sight better than it is now. Being owned by a multi-national has done the beer no favours at all.
"Numerous large breweries make excellent real ale in England."
The real big boys don't produce cask ale anymore. The best producers of cask ale are (in global terms) small/medium concerns, still run by the original family in a lot of cases. Samuel Smith, Fullers and Timothy Taylor are good examples, and are not that big really. These, of course, are established breweries making tried and trusted products, loved by many drinkers, but IMHO the most exciting ranges of beers in Britain are being brewed by small breweries such as Brewdog, Dark Star and Meantime.
In the end personal taste must rule: I like a number of commercial (large-brewery) beers, and named some. I don't like others, probably 90% of the total but amongst the 10% are beers that are truly excellent IMO.
The same applies to the craft beer segment except there stability is more of an issue since these products are largely unpasteurized.
But once again we are in the realm of personal taste, and as a bartender reminded me recently, "that is why there are so many beers out there".
I have been drinking Urquell since about 1975 and find it essentially the same as back then. Other beers strike me as different, e.g., Michelob (despite returning to all-malt some years ago), or Tuborg, say.
The small craft breweries in the U.K. make great real ales in many cases, no question. But large breweries did the same for many years too, if they do not know, that is because the structure of the market changed. Director's and Ind Coope Burton were great beers when I drank them about 15 years ago and were made by large concerns. I assume they are still available but am not sure who makes them today.
Fuller's is a great company and its family ownership does tend to encourage high quality, but of course it operates rather beyond a craft scale. Young's beers were a similar example (I haven't tried them under the Charles Wells aegis).
Gary
Gary
"I have been drinking Urquell since about 1975 and find it essentially the same as back then. Other beers strike me as different, e.g., Michelob (despite returning to all-malt some years ago), or Tuborg, say."
I am surprised that you think Pilsner Urquell tastes the same as it did in the Communist era - you're the first person I've heard that does. I bow to your superior knowledge of Michelob and Tuborg.
Ind Coope closed years ago, and neither Directors' nor Youngs' Ordinary are the same as they were, with neither still brewed in the breweries where they were created.
Fullers make as good a range of ales as any brewery in the world, but, as I said, whilst they're not a "craft" brewery (whatever that is), they're not really all that big....
Rod, if Fuller's aren't "craft" then that's a good demonstration of how useless the term is.
I'm with Pivni Filosof on how to classify breweries.
I define breweries in 3 ways, and in this was much influenced by Michael Jackson:
- craft brewery, set up last 10-30 years, generally with much lesser output than an old-established regional not to mention a national-scale operation
- old-established regional (Fuller, Schlenkerla, Choulette, Jenlain, Anchor in SF, Yuengling, Genessee, Cooper`s, etc etc)
- large commercial brewery.
Taste cuts across these categories as I said a number of times.
Gary
Gary
So what would you call Sierra Nevada?
They're about the same size as Fullers.
Oh, and Ron - your comment about Fullers not being a "craft" brewery is a good one. I don't think the term has any meaning at all, except, possibly, within the American industry. It's certainly absolutely meaningless in Belgium and Germany.
Inevitably there will be some blending of categories and Sierra Nevada is still a craft brewery in my view due to its relatively youth (30 years) and the very high quality of its products. By the same token, there are some reasonably large producers established in the same period whose products are styled to the mass taste and I would not call them craft brewers. An extreme example would be a brewery set up to produce price beers (low-cost or discount brews).
I think in the North American context the term craft brewery retains meaning for most beer fans despite some blurring. For the U.K., I use the term, as did Jackson and some others, to denote more the new generation of brewers since the 1970's.
It's terminology, inevitably not perfect but I find it useful.
Gary
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