Micro or Macro?

While I am firmly in the micro (craft) camp, I do believe that every beer has its place, even macros.

 

Good beer is good beer.

 

Totally depends. There are great small breweries that I support, but there are plenty of small breweries cranking out substandard beer, too.
While I think light lagers are generally garbage, there are plenty of solid breweries that have massive corporate ownership. Of the 6 breweries in Munich, 4 of them are owned by multinational conglomerates. There are Belgian breweries with similar situations. In my own back yard, we have AC Golden and Blue Moon.
Big doesn't necessarily mean bad and small doesn't necessarily mean good.

 

I drink both, no shits given.

 

I do prefer craft (micro) beer, without a doubt, more flavor, more variety. However, I can admit to enjoying some of the big beers (macro) out there. That being said, I am very much against what appears to be happening in the USA. Soon we will have just one corporation producing and marketing the vast majority of beer in our Nation. This seems very UN-American to me, and since it is a foreign corporation that is doubly so. I am hoping this means continued opportunity for the growth of craft brewing.

 

Tomato, toemato.

 

Agreed... I just hope it isn't the government running it. It will be bankrupt in a year with no availability and QC will be just a catch phrase.

 

There's a lot of food for thought in this earlier thread:

http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/no-love-for-american-adjunct-lagers.313784/

 

Ill drink both. Obviously prefer craft but all have time and place.

 

When stakeholders finally 86 Brito, I'll feel better about all this.

 

As others have stated, good beer should be the only category we care about. There are TONS of micro breweries that put out crappy beer. With Macro beers, the consistency is there. It may not be as good as the majority of the micro craft beers, but it definitely has it's place.

 

Micro is no longer used as a term for craft beers since a lot of the bigger craft brewers would no longer be classified as "micro-" meaning 50,000 BBL per year, maximum output. Sierra Nevada, Sam Adams, Summit and Schell's all brew in the hundreds of thousands of barrels per year; although, they do have one of the qualifier's in that they all begin with "S".

 

Macros are beer?

 

Micro, for sure; but too many mico drinkers are dickholes.

 

Micro means you're contributing to a small business desperately trying to earn a profit so that they can continue to drink beer while doing a job they love. I associate micro with the band that plays in local restaurants. They say want to make it big, but really, they love playing in front of people and want to earn enough to survive.
Music is music, and beer is beer. But if you want to support local, drink local.

As long as its not a light beer. AKA water with a slight beer flavoring.

 

Most of the macrobreweries would prefer the microbreweries fail and disappear...inbev for example so (lots of ugly words)....

 

I drink must anything and enjoy it, with these caveats: I almost never have a light beer (and only if free), and I avoid flavored/gimic beers (whether macro or micro) -- I will buy a maximum of one to say that I tried it, but I have yet to try one that I would buy a second time. I buy and drink more macro than micro both because I enjoy them and because my beer budget would not support a sufficient quantity of beer if I bought only micro.

 

I drink both because i cant keep consecutively drinking IPAs during football season, it wrecks my tastes and i get completely wasted, fast. So i still drink Rolling Rock, MGD, Ballantine, PBR and Coors Banquet.

 

The Brewers Association defines "microbrewery" as "A brewery that produces less than 15,000 barrels..." and it's been that way for, at least, a couple of decades (the exact same wording is used in the 1996-1997 North American Brewers Resource Directory from the Institute for Brewing Studies (one of the two forerunners of the current Brewers Association).

In the '80s, the "limit" was usually around 10,000 bbl. (essentially, "smaller than Anchor" the then long time smallest brewery in the US) and then bumped up to 12k bbl. for a short time (IIRC).