If Nobody Cares about "Craft"

Then why does it seem to matter so much?

I wrote an article last week about “craft” beer—you can find it here if you missed it. I had a blast with it in all honesty, the feedback and comments were interesting and gave me different perspectives to consider, perspectives that aren’t often heard from within the sound-muffling walls of the beer industry bubble.

I saw time and time again that people were frustrated about the subject, because they, in their own words, didn’t care about it. In one instance, a reader commented four times to lament that time was being spent contemplating a subject “only manbuns care about”. Hate to state the obvious, but I wrote the piece, and I’m a woman with a bun.

There has always been a backlash opinion about “craft” beer (I continue to use these shit-eating air quotes around the word because it truly means nothing as a descriptor or as a branding tool) that it’s a niche product and therefore only nerds, hipsters, or losers care about it. I’ve always enjoyed the idea of this hypothetical group of people. Homebrew nerds hanging out with CAMRA vets, hanging out with hipsters, all brought together by their apparent shared obsession with hops. What an image. World peace.

The idea that it doesn’t really matter whether “craft” beer is called “craft” beer is something I hear a lot too, and I guess I can understand the frustration. It’s boring to hear the same arguments over and over again, and if you’re just out to drink a beer you enjoy, regardless of its provenance, you probably don’t want another lecture. But this is something I think we, as drinkers, have gotten wrong. It does matter. If it didn’t, why would big breweries be clinging to the term long after acquiring the branding rights? (Just for interest’s sake, this blog post titled “What is Craft Beer?” on the Beavertown site didn’t age well.

Illustration by Jessica Kendrew

I bring to this little show-and-tell, the arch-nemesis of the independent beer world, Brewdog. Despite all they’ve put their workers through, regardless of how often they’ve dragged their own name through the mud, they remain technically independent. It seems that the only thing James Watt won’t do is sell Brewdog to a corporate brewery company like AB-InBev or Heineken. Why is that?

In 2018, Watt told The Grocer: “I’d rather shoot myself in the head than sell out and be a rich motherf***er”

22% of Brewdog’s equity belongs to US-based private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners, with shares also owned by CEO James Watt (24%) and Co-Founder Martin Dickie (20%) and, of course, the Equity Punks (18%). Where the remaining 12% is I’m not sure—there is some more detailed information on their IPO status here. The main reason for TSG Consumer Partner’s existence is as a capital investment firm, and to work with companies to invest in their brands in order to spread them as far and wide over the marketplace as possible, specialising in franchising, marketing performance, and product development. Rather than sell out to a big brewery, it would seem that Brewdog would rather become one—retaining the “independent” and “craft” terminology on their branding as they do so.

I have one thought on this: despite the number of people who regard these terms as superficial and unimportant, they must mean something to the people who matter. The people with deep pockets, the investors, it seems to matter to them. If it didn’t, companies like Brewdog would have binned it off long ago. For some reason, “craft” continues to be important to their product, which proves, to me, that somewhere along the line, sales depend on it. No matter how often we tell ourselves that “craft” means nothing, if it really didn’t, brewery owners wouldn’t bend over backwards to be able to use the word. If selling out really wasn’t a problem for the marketplace, Brewdog wouldn’t have made millions portraying itself as a subversive outsider to the corporate side of beer, and it wouldn’t still be trying to cling to that branding and the optics it sells.

We all got bored of defining craft a decade ago. But just because something is boring, doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Occasionally, things need repeating over and over again, just so that people really get it.