When companies brewing great beer became too big to be called "micro," while still producing a quality product.
I've always thought the term "Microbrew" was a good term. I still hear plenty of non-beer nerds asking about microbrews, and I am still waiting to hear the first usage of the term "Craft beer" in the wild. Of course, as I've mentioned before, around here it's all just "beer".
The prefix Micro was originally added to the word brewery ("Microbrewery") and intended to convey the size of the brewery, meaning a brewery producing less than 15,000 barrels per year. That was back in the 1980s, of course. In the years following the initial use of the term, people seeking new flavor profiles in the beer they drank (often as a "hobby") came to use terms like microbeer or microbrew in a generic fashion, but the intent was to convey a meaning beyond the scope of the original use of the term. This newer meaning was that beers brewed by smaller breweries were generally of superior quality and/or of superior flavor profile to mass-brewed pale, industrial lager brands. Circa the late 1990s "Craft Beer" assumed "Microbeers" mantle as the generic, catch-all phrase used to imply excellent flavor profile and high quality in beer. It took a few more years for the beer hobbyists to catch up, and the general drinking public is just now catching up.
This ^^ I hear and use the term "microbrewery" still, but haven't heard anything called a "microbrew" in a long time.
The origin of the term “craft brewery” was discussed in this thread: http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/when-was-micro-brew-renamed-craft-beer.5835/ You will read that @jesskidden opines that the beer author Vince Cottone should be credited for the popularization of this term (circa 1986). Cheers!
