What is “Craft Beer”?

Craft beer, as a term, has been exploding. Everyone has jumped on the bandwagon and even I included “craft beer” in the name of my blog. But there is no common answer to what it is. Brew news have done a great job starting a discussion on it here - http://www.brewsnews.com.au/2011/01/what-is-craft-beer/

To me, craft beer is covering two movements that is happening in the beer world at the same time –

• We are caring more and more about who owns the products we eat and drink. Therefore more and more “independent” breweries are appearing and the media is playing more and more to the country of origin “Australian owned brewery Coopers…” opposed to the sinister “Conglomerate Brewery Fosters has…”…
• The beer market, is dying; people are getting tired of it and moving to cider, spirit mixers etc. In response, large breweries are making beers lighter, and less flavoursome to still appeal to the sugary pre mixed drinkers. This has then resulted in the comeback of Ales and “Craftyness” – speciality beers, with weird and wonderful flavours. People who don’t want a beer that is little more than alcoholic slightly flavoured water.  

In my opinion, a craft beer is simply a good beer, that is so full of flavour and hops which means it can’t be mass marketed – you wouldn’t go to a rugby game expecting to find Coopers or James Squires, never mind “Stone & Wood Pacific Ale” or “Dad and Daves No#1 beer”.

But I am one of those people in the first bullet point above – while I love Fat Yat, Squires or Little Creatures, I prefer supporting, sampling, and looking out for the micro brewers. Going to brew houses or microbreweries like HopDog in Nowra is just awesome.

But the world should not be against these large breweries – they are using their scale to get more full flavoured beers on the taps of the big pubs and chains, this will help educate beer drinkers to the variety of flavours and tastes opposed to switching to other drinks. If Malt Shovel didn’t produce James Squires, I may have never got into craft beer and microbreweries.