It seems to me that more and more the designation for "Craft" beer is meaningless. I was given a bottle of Minhas Thumper IPA and DIPA. They are both really bad. The DIPA is doubly bad. Yet, right on the bottle cap it reads "Craft Beer." The term "craft" means nothing anymore - especially if Minhas swill is considered "craft." I think it makes more sense to talk about "good" beer and "bad" beer. Typically good beer is not made on a macro scale - though that is not by necessity the case - just as it is not necessarily the case that a micro brewery will make good beer. Minhas - case in point.
Made the mistake of buying a couple of these a few yrs back in Winnipeg. Had never heard of them so assumed it was a new small brewery. Tasted like garbage regardless how you define it.
This Minhas is a bit of an enigma. I bought a four pack of their beer, a couple of years back, that had those two and both were grossly expired (yet recently distributed to stores). The beers were mostly awful, because they had gone bad. In fact their other beers I've tried weren't much better. They apparently own a couple of places in Calgary and Wisconsin and do some contract brewing.
I wouldn't call Minhas micro. They are the 10th largest craft brewery in the US by volume ahead of Brooklyn, DFH, Founders... I just wonder who buys their swirl that much.
"Craft beer" is not a very useful appellative term. It's not like there's some sort of rigorous qualification program that a brewery needs to pass in order to label the beer as being 'craft-brewed'. Minhas beers are truly and consistently terrible. I would take any standard MolBatt's product over anything in Minhas' portfolio without even stopping to think about it.
The further problem with Minhas (trust me, I could go on all day) is that beyond their shitty product, their sales reps are incredibly pushy, and obviously uncaring about anything other than money, as stores (especially the big chain in Alberta) wind up with too much product, often outdated, though you can't know for sure, because freshness dating on beer bottles, whazzat? I do know for a fact that Sherbrooke and Keg n Cork in Edmonton will not allow any Minhas products to cross their thresholds - knowingly - of course there have been a few slip-ups over the years, what with Minhas' propensity for 'crafty' marketing angles. All that said, it is indeed fun to kick back and expel some vitriol in a beer review once in a while.
That has been the case for quite a few years now. Minhas is plenty bad, there's certainly no denying that. But nowadays it's increasingly clear that a lot of new brewers calling themselves "craft" are no better. So, "caveat emptor", and just buy a bottle at a time when trying new brewer's stuff. I've found that about half of the time, it might be decent. The rest of the time, it invariably ranges from fairly amateur tasting to downright heinous.
To paraphrase what I read elsewhere: Minhas beer tastes like sadness feels. Another reason why craft means nothing anymore is a brewery like Founders is not considered craft because of the amount of beer they brew. So here we have the situation where Founders is not considered craft and Minhas is. The world does not make sense.
I as a good beer enthusiast... would like to truly shed a tear as I have never had a drop of Minhas and am torturing myself drinking an Oct 1st dated Founders Harvest Ale... truly torture... right now.
Founders is not considered "craft" only by the Brewers Association, because they are more than 25% "owned or controlled (or equivalent economic interest) by an alcoholic beverage industry member that is not itself a craft brewer" since the Spanish macro Mahou San Miguel bought [too large of] a minority share. Founders is nowhere near the B.A.'s barrelage limit of under 6m bbl/yr for "craft".
Minhas needs to take a page out of the the Brick/Waterloo/Laker or whatever it is called playbook. "Waterloo Dark is not just craft. It's crafted!"
