Is There Any Value Left in the Terms “Craft Beer” or “Craft Brewer”?

The argument–frequently my own argument–that the terms “craft beer” or “craft brewer” have outlived any form of legitimate usefulness or coherence is not exactly a new one at this point. For close to a decade, former craft beer evangelists have watched from the sidelines as the once seemingly concrete, advocacy-tinged terminology of the industry has eroded under the sheer, unrelenting force of outside entropy, seemingly infecting any label one could use to designate this brewery or that company as part of the fraternity of virtuous small business champions opposing international megacorps. A decade ago, we were already observing that the AB InBevs of the world intended to use the inconceivable vastness of their corporate structure to make informed choices a near impossibility for all but the most rabidly informed craft zealots, and they ultimately succeeded beyond even our expectations–obfuscation of ownership and process was the name of the game, and Big Beer played the game expertly, watering down the seeming importance of ownership in the process. What we couldn’t foresee at the time was the now seemingly obvious receding of the greater “better beer” wave itself, which would lead those same megacorps to increasingly abandon “craft” beer as a profitable venture. And with the likes of AB InBev and Molson Coors ditching their craft beer investments in the last couple years, what does that really mean for the status of those brewing companies now gobbled up by the next generation of would-be profiteers? Have these terms become even more antiquated in 2024, or is there any value left in calling someone a “craft brewer”?

This is the type of running conversation that is always simmering away in the back of my mind, every time I’m sitting in a local brewery taproom, wondering how much such terminology or labels mean to the customers patronizing the establishment. Do these drinkers care if their local brewer is “independent,” for instance? If polled, I imagine they would like the idea of supporting a small, independent business, but would they ever bother to do the research to determine if any given brewery they’re visiting meets that standard? Are those ideals worth any real effort to the consumer, in other words?

Or to put it another way: When Canadian cannabis giant Tilray announced yesterday that it was acquiring four more U.S. breweries from Molson Coors, does that change any consumer’s calculus of how they look at those brands? Devoted fans of those four brands (Terrapin Beer Co., Hop Valley Brewing Co., Revolver Brewing, and Atwater Brewery)–does it matter to you in any way that an organization like the Brewers Association will now once again technically view these companies as possessing the “craft brewer” title when they didn’t qualify for that term during their years under Molson Coors? Does anyone believe that a giant cannabis corporation gobbling up small breweries somehow will act as a better steward for those brands than a giant brewing corporation was? I find that rather hard to buy.

Honestly, I’m not sure the consumer who legitimately cares about these types of distinctions still exists, even in the margins–the exponential increase in complications of sussing out the significance of ownership in the last decade has made it so that it’s an unreasonable amount of work to expect any consumer to know who owns what, and whether that parent company is “someone who should be supported” or not, by whatever ethical metric you would choose to employ. And that’s coming from a consumer who once would have described himself as caring deeply about these exact distinctions. Today, I can’t help but acknowledge that the beer industry has effectively had The Good Place‘s titular problem play out, and it’s made a mess of anyone trying to be an informed consumer: There are too many variables at play to feel like you have any chance of employing a consistent ideology when you’re deciding which breweries to support. The easiest thing is to simply stop caring, so I can hardly blame any consumer who does exactly that. In my own life, I responded by largely just buying entirely local beer, from my own city, and letting the rest of the chips fall where they may.

Consider the way groups of breweries have amalgamated in the last few years under entities that no reasonable person would describe as “small” or “independent.” Tilray Brands Inc. is an American/Canadian cannabis and pharmaceutical company operating as far as Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Portugal, who first made a splash in the beer world with their acquisition of Atlanta’s SweetWater Brewing Co. in 2020. At the time, one probably would have expected the sale to be a one-off, a bit of savvy cross-marketing between a cannabis producer and one of the U.S. craft beer brands most associated with cannabis culture. But Tilray then went on an absolute acquisitions bender in the years since, raiding the AB InBev corporate portfolio to acquire brands like Shock Top, along with formerly independent craft brewers like Breckenridge Brewery, Blue Point Brewing Company, 10 Barrel Brewing Company, Redhook Brewery, and Widmer Brothers Brewing. They then scooped up some fallen West Coast icons in Green Flash Brewing and Alpine Beer Co., before now loading up even more with the Molson Coors acquisitions of Terrapin Beer Co., Hop Valley Brewing Co., Revolver Brewing, and Atwater Brewery. All of them–including longtime regional rivals like SweetWater and Terrapin–now under one big, corporate tent together. Last year, Tilray posted revenue of $627 million. Nothing about it feels very classically “craft beer.”