Update: What is a craft brewer?

I asked this question towards the end of my last post and I found a few answers. 

The Brewers Association used the following definition:

Small: Annual production of beer less than 2 million barrels. Beer production is attributed to a brewer according to the rules of alternating proprietorships. Flavored malt beverages are not considered beer for purposes of this definition.

Independent: Less than 25% of the craft brewery is owned or controlled (or equivalent economic interest) by an alcoholic beverage industry member who is not themselves a craft brewer.

Traditional: A brewer who has either an all malt flagship (the beer which represents the greatest volume among that brewers brands) or has at least 50% of its volume in either all malt beers or in beers which use adjuncts to enhance rather than lighten flavor.

Which brings me back to my question of what the difference is between a Blue Moon and a Sam Adams…

Blue Moon:

• Small: Yes, about 500,000 barrels, well below the limit in the definition
• Independent: No, owned by Coors, not a craft brewer by virtue of size and tradition criteria
• Traditional: I think yes.  Blue Moon’s Belgian-style White is definitely 50%+ of their sales, and I can’t find evidence anywhere that it is not an all-malt beer.  Their label says it is made with wheat and oat malts, and I’ve looked all over but I can’t find any evidence of adjuncts. 

Sam Adams:

• Small: Yes, for now, but almost a no.  Boston Beers knows they’re going to break the 2 million barrel mark soon so their website proposed that the ’small’ criteria be rewritten as: “Annual production of beer less than 2 million barrels or annual production of beer exceeds 2 million barrels and the brewery was founded as a Craft Brewer and continues to satisfy the other Craft Brewer defining criteria.”
• Independent: Yes, and publicly traded.
• Traditional: Yes, according to their website.

So, in my mind, this begs the question: what is the value of the first two criteria?  In the end shouldn’t we just care about the quality of the beer, which is what the ‘traditional’ criteria is meant to guarantee?

If Coors actually makes a good beer we all act scared that they are going to muscle into the craft brew industry and destroy it, and we fault the smaller craft-style brewery (Blue Moon) for not being independent.

If Sam actually succeeds in converting enough drinkers to their good beer, they lose their designation as a craft brew for being too big.  This makes little sense because:

(A) The same beer that was a craft brew one day, won’t be the next (when Sam crosses the 2M barrel threshold)

(B) It’s so arbitrary.  Why 2M barrels instead of 1M or 5M?  Did they do research to determine that beer quality declines sharply at that point?  I doubt it.  Plus, it certainly used to be lower.  Craft beer used to be synonymous with microbreweries, which are defined as making no more than 15K barrels per year.  The whole term ‘craftbrew’ was coined to include larger brewers that brew traditional all-malt beers.  Why was the tent expanded then, but not now?

(C) It’s entirely unclear to me what the size of a brewery has to do with their craftsmanship.  Sure, it is a lot harder to brew good beer in increasing batch sizes, but it’s not impossible.  We ought to allow for the possibility of a brewer that is both large and high quality.  They could brew in multiple locations, so no one batch is too large.  They could hire top talent from smaller breweries to keep growing.  And there are plenty of small breweries that make bad beer, so just as there’s no reason to assume that large = bad, the same goes for small = good.

And on a tangentially related note, I’d like to ask the Brewers Association about their ‘traditional’ criteria:

First, It seems relatively subjective given that I’m sure there is some gray area around whether an adjunct is being used to ‘enhance’ or ‘lighten’ the flavor of a beer.  How do you judge which it is doing?  Also, though I’m really just playing devil’s advocate here because I like beers with strong flavors, couldn’t an adjunct do both, enhance and lighten?

Second, shouldn’t the criteria be called something other than ‘traditional’? Maybe ‘high-quality’? (Though I admit this has less of a ring to it.)  So many of the craft brews out there are anything but traditional, it just seems like the wrong word to use to describe them and by which to judge them.