Poll: should we continue using the term "craft" to describe beer?

Ive been drinking the good shit for awhile now. And in all my conversations about beer, I never readily referred to what I was drinking "craft". i.e "oh this craft beer here, oh have you tried this craft beer, the best craft beer yadda yadda".
Never been used or really havent heard other beer lovers keep saying craft when we drink our brews together.
Sure, we are part of the craft beer scene, but to describe beer as craft, no, if you're gonna desribe beer you're mention style etc, not that its considered craft.
It just sounds so odd in conversation, that if you mention it to me trying to describe a beer, it just sounds like you're trying to hard to sell me something right now.

 

My wife is amused that I am getting into craft beer. If I got into beer, that would not be so truen

 

1. Until the majority of people accept beer for being beer, then some word needs to be used to describe beers that are not American Adjuncts. There are a few other styles that people know, but associate it with a particular beer (guiness with stout or Newcastle with Brown ale) but they do not really go for them on a very regular basis. To the masses it isn't beer it is something else, and they need to be educated, and until then it needs to be distinguished.

2. The word craft to me says that the item in question was built by hand using traditional methods. There are improvements and innovations to the styles, but the most important thing is that it was built up by hand. Keeping the industrial production out of it is what makes an item craft. You can have an item that starts out as craft, but ends up not craft later in the lifecycle of the product.

Taking this point back around to beer, obviously the macros are more industrial and therefore not craft. SN, BBC, and the other big producers of "craft" beer I would say are straddling the line of being more not "craft" than not. There is no problem with this, but the "craft" tag needs to stay on them so that they can be distinguished as different.

 

'Beer' and 'Industrial Lagers' has always worked for me, and there never was a good reason to alter that in the first place.

 

Yes, when appropriate - mainly to differentiate it from industrial swill.

 

What methods, techniques, and equipment are "craft" brewers using that "non-craft" brewers aren't? From the largest to the smallest, it's all just kettles, pumps, hoses, tanks, packages, and trucks. Just so yeast can eat sugar water, and we can drink yeast poop.

 

Time to recognize that the word "craft" is here to stay whether anyone feels it is accurate/appropriate or not. As @JackHorzempa points out earlier, in the context of beer, craft simply means not a mass market beer and carries no necessary implication a quality product, just a different product. That's the way the world of language works and it ain't gonna change. Just as price gouging on beer now means "a price I don't like" and no longer has its original meaning, just as hype of beer now means "the excitement some other people feel about a beer" and no longer has its original meaning, so too craft beer no longer means hand crafted (if it ever did at all).

 

Design and production of new recipes that involve more than just tweaking ingredients because of agricultural variability.

 

Yes, it is all just making the same thing with the same equipment (scaled up or down) but the industrial quality makes it different. the larger breweries are more assembly line in their building of a product while the smaller breweries are not as much until the bottling phase.

^ this is the perfect example. The industrial method is that you need x pounds of this ingredient, x pounds of that ingredient and it comes out to almost the same product every time. Someone that is following craft methods is constantly altering the recipe to make it taste better.

 

You mean like "stout" and "India pale ale?"

 

Craft brewers don't do that for their flagships? The tweak ingredients thing.

 

Situation 1
p1: do you like beer?
p2: I love beer!
P1: you should come to my place on Saturday for a share!
p2:*confused* ok?
shows up with a 30 rack of bud light

Situation 2
P1: do you like craft beer?
P2: not really into that kind of stuff. I just drink bud light.

 

I believe we must.

 

I voted Not Sure. Sometimes it sounds okay, other times I put it in quotation marks and use emphatic air quotation mark hand gestures. While I continue pondering this, I'll start thinking about which Microbrews I'll buy tomorrow.

 

Exactly! And it's sorta rude to say, "Do you have any beers that don't suck?"

When I go to the beer distributor I walk past all of the 7 ft. high stacks of crappy macros with cardboard cut-outs of bikini models in front of them to get to the craft/imports section in the back. If they want to change their signage from "craft/imports" to "here's where we keep the good shit" that's fine with me, but I have a feeling it wouldn't go over too well with the folks from bud or coors.

 

Sure they do, but many do not just stick to only brewing their flagships once they have them in place. Many also explore new possibilities, e.g., there are at least 3-4 breweries within less than an hours drive from where I type this who have also done such additional things as a new line of special releases intended to be one off brewings using locally sourced ingredients (eg an oyster stout with oyster or a DIPA using wild rice) or single hop versions of Pils style beers, IPAs, Pale Ales. Some have tried Brett yeast for bottle conditioning. And the list goes on. In each case the brewer is/was focused on designing/developing new beers and exploring new possibilities. Some of those beers have survived and even replaced older flagship beers, some have been one-offs, but all have made it possible for some of us at least to both travel along and even provide feedback through repeat buying or long chats with local sales reps and even brewery owners conducting tasting sessions. Each of the places I'm thinking of continues to brew beers they want to drink and the ones the rest of us like often survive.

 

"Craft" implies that the beer was made by an artisan and not mass-produced swill. I prefer "Microbrew" myself, but I think the term "Craft" is appropriate as well...it's part of modern beer vernacular, so who fucking cares.

Recent conversation with a friend:
Want a Miller Lite? Fuck no...Do they have any craft beer here?
They got Sweetwater and Boulevard. Rad...That'll work.

 

Schlenkerla, Timothy Taylor and Orval all make beers that are not BMC, but are not "craft" either. So what are these then? And before you say "imports" - to most of the population that's going to mean something like Heineken, and since most pro-craft people in this thread are concerned about what the larger population think, that isn't really going to fly. Plus to many non-American BAs these are going to be neither craft nor imported.

 

Feel free to create your own word to describe the beers you mentioned.

I will still use the term "craft" to describe beers that are not Bud Light, Bud, Coors Light, Miller Lite, ....

Cheers!