The craft brewing movement and homebrewing wouldn’t be around if it wasn’t for King A-B supporting legaslation to get the ball rolling.

Attacking the big boys who are producing non rice/corn beers isn’t the way to go.

On the other hand, we have to keep in mind that this is an organization designed to protect the interest of its members. To that extent, I can see the logic in this. One need only browse through the BeerAdvocate forum to see the anti-big brewery sentiment that many share. I suppose it’s easier for small breweries to go after Goose Island and Sam Adams than it is to go after Budweiser. After all, if you accept the premise that most craft beer drinkers stick to crafts and most macro drinkers stick to macros, then big crafts and little crafts are the ones competing over the same consumers.

Personally, I think the risk here for the Brewers Association is that, in making up rules where the most successful are essentially kicked out of the club, they lose the portion of the craft market that’s best suited to help everybody else. Look at how Boston Beer helped out smaller breweries during the hop shortage? At what point does Jim Koch say, “fuck it; you guys are on your own”? Right now, the market is craft vs. macro, and craft is winning (in terms of increased market share and sales, that is). Do they really want to make it small craft vs. large craft vs. macro? Who wins then?

But what has pissed me off for years is what seems to me to be an organized effort to belittle the fact that since he was smart enough to keep his money available for marketing and distribution while using the services of faltering regional breweries to make his beers, he wasn’t considered in certain circles to be a “real” brewer. Here was a guy who actually helped to keep people working in dying regional breweries, and yet the innuendos always were that his approach was wrong. He wasn’t a brewer; excuse me, he wasn’t a real “craft” brewer.

When he managed to win a couple of awards at some of the earlier GABFs, the stories were floated about that he had somehow “bought” votes by handing out swag…that people were stupid enough to be bought by a free tee-shirt in return for casting a positive vote for his entries. It was never that his beers were good, n-o-o-o, he “bought” the votes. Adding to all of this was the same old charge that he wasn’t a “craft” brewer, an utterly stupid argument that somehow made the use of a word or category that someone simply dreamed up one day as being more important than the process of just brewing good beer.

Koch’s been behind the Longshot concept, the ACCION USA program and even handed out hops when the market turned upside down. And yet every now and then, there’s still grumblings out there about the fact that he’s not a real “craft” brewer. Hell, the guy bought a brewery in Ohio. What else does he have to do?

The divisivness that’s been created because Koch has done things differently than someone’s framing of artificial buzz words and classifications has always seemed to be a bit too coordinated to me. Maybe I’m just being paranoid but I’ve always felt there’s been a driving force involved in slamming Koch and his approach to the brewing business.

And then a few years ago, this crap started that suddenly redefined what a craft brewery is, and Goose Island in Chicago, a brewery that continues to climb up the sales rung, disappeared from the list, along with others who had been part of the brewing community for years.

I don’t get any of this. Who sits and makes one edict after another that suddenly makes a brewery a non-entity? A guy contracts beer and he’s a bum? Now a brewery is smart enough to work with a company that just so happens to have the largest distribution system in the U.S. and it’s a bum too?

So what are breweries suppose to do? Reach a certain level and then refuse to grow further? Should we start putting caps on production numbers or put an asterisk next to a brewery’s sales figures like they’re Major League Baseball steriod users?

I read that manifesto above and all I can think of is a bunch of old hippies, sitting around and playing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in the background.

Grow up. Brewing is a business. It’s there to make customers happy, make good beer and make a profit and I certainly don’t think it needs a bunch of idealists sitting around and making “profound” announcements from Olympus with a wave of a pen.

When I don’t agree with an organization or a business, I take my money somewhere else. It might be time for some breweries who have business maturity to move on. If you’re not wanted, why sit around and be abused?

Boston Brewing is highly respected because even though they have been successful, and grown, they seem to remember their roots and do cool stuff for small brewers like sell supplies at cost. Doesn’t that mean anything, or is it all about the production numbers?

but when asked about adding nutritional labeling to beers, they’re against it. Hypocrites.

I suggest that the folks in Boulder put down the bottle and reach for a bong. When the Brewers Association can suddenly reclassify a brewery like Goose Island in Chicago as no longer being a “craft” brewery simply because they’ve made business arrangements with Anheuser-Busch for enhanced distribution, there’s something seriously wrong with these people.

If there’s such a problem with smaller breweries working with Coors or A-B, why doesn’t the Brewers Association and all their entities send back those checks for the full-page ads that these larger breweries run in their publications? Hah!

And for those breweries who also have fallen under this stupid stigma created by the Buddha in Boulder, I suggest they simply quit participating in BA events and stop advertising in their publications.

Why support an organization that pigeonholes you as somehow consorting with the devil?

Cheers,

Andy