I know that Beoir has an official definition of the type of beer we support, namely beer made in Ireland by breweries producing under 20000 hectolitres per annum (is that correct?). I agree that that sort of beer is worth supporting, but I wanted to have a stab at the general question of what constitutes craft beer, which might be applicable for craft beer from other countries. I know some people are sick of this topic, but I personally don't find it very satisfying that I can't attach a meaningful definition to 'craft beer' that properly marks the distinction between the good guys and the bad guys. I don't want to feel I'm just pledging allegiance to a kind of slogan.
I don't think the 'craft' label is good as it stands because craft doesn't mean much more to me than made with skill and I don't think you can deny the big guys make beer skillfully. So it doesn't in fact draw the distinction we're after between the big guys and the rest.
I don't think putting a threshold out there and saying beer produced by breweries making less than this number is craft beer, because any choice of number is going to be arbitrary and it won't be easy to say why two companies on either side of the line should be treated differently. And optimistically, if the demographics changed the market for craft beer could grow massively, and we might suddenly find our favourite companies ceasing to be craft by definition.
I don't think craft beer can be defined as simply good beer, because the big guys can produce good beer and stuff by small independent breweries occasionally isn't good. To say nothing of the fact that matters of taste are subjective and individual.
I’m wondering whether the distinction we’re after could be usefully explicated in terms of the concept of authorship, with a craft brewery being one where someone in the organization, probably the brewer, stands to the beer in roughly the relation that an author stands to his or her books or films or what have you. I think you know what I mean.
An author has control over the creative process and takes responsibility for the final product. The product reflects the author’s distinctive style. This contrasts with a more widely dispersed distribution of responsibility in large industries. In the industrial 'no-author' situation, the decision to make a product of a certain type (a beer, a Christmas themed romantic comedy etc.) rests with the leaders of the organisation. They then have certain specialised employees (brewers, script writers etc.) produce a prototype of the product. This might involve a lot of creative labour but that labour doesn’t buy any special influence in how things ultimately turn out for the product. Then the prototypes are tested and put to focus groups etc. Data from the tests is collected and worked over and then the leaders of the organisation decide whether to go ahead with the product based on whether they expect it to be profitable given the focus group tests. The decision procedure can almost be automated. It is totally objective because it just depends on how well the prototypes fared with the focus groups. The decision makers can still take a gamble, but they don't have to take a personal interest in the product.
An author by contrast does take a personal interest in the product. They do gamble. Their attitude is that if the public don't like it, get a new public. The product will come to be appreciated as an acquired taste (like a cult classic). They don't change the product to conform to the public's tastes, but try to change the public's taste to match the product. The product reflects the author's personal style because the author has taken such a personal interest in it.
Maybe the idea of authorship suggests the beer is made by a single person, but actually authorship isn't incompatible with collaboration between people. Gilbert and Sullivan were the joint authors of their musicals, the Coen brothers are the joint authors of their films, etc, but it probably gets harder to have a genuinely authorial relationship to the work the more people are involved in creating it, until you just get something produced by committee. This fact, it seems to me, offers an explanation, without drawing an arbitrary line, of why it is smaller enterprises tend to be more craft than big ones, because the organizational structures militate against a genuinely authorial relationship with the product.
Finally, I think the craft brewer as author suggestion explains why we might want to support craft beer as such. We might support them because authors create diversity and as beer consumers we value diversity. We might support them because authors are dedicated to excellence as they conceive it and that might be conducive to good beer as we individual consumers conceive it.
(There might be other grounds to support independent microbreweries completely separate from whether there’s a brewer-author. Even if it was designed by a committee, a local beer made with local ingredients giving employment to the local community etc. may be worth supporting for social, economic and environmental reasons. But I think most people here want to support craft beer from other countries too. I think the authorship definition might provide a helpful way of saying what’s important and worth supporting about this sort of beer).
Anyway, that's just some thoughts.
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