Is BrewDog Still Craft?

Semantics, semantics.

Earlier this week, hop Jesus Pete Brown took some time to preach the virtues of craft beer to a small and, perhaps previously uninformed, audience at Hotelympia (a trade show that, perplexingly, wasn’t at Olympia).

To complement Pete’s extolling, four beers were put forward for restaurateurs, hoteliers, et al. They were: Camden Town’s Pils, Beavertown’s Smog Rocket, Sierra Nevada’s IPA, and Meantime’s IPA. At first, I scoffed — out of all the beers he could have chosen, he went with these? Surely out of all that is craft, this lot — with the exception of Beavertown — represent the end of the spectrum which is almost non-craft?

Starting with Camden, Pete admitted everyone has their own definition of the word ‘craft’, and this brewery’s recent buyout only contributes to that discourse. Under higher power or not, Camden Town can be accepted as a large brewery — large in that they were able to sell 12 million pints last year. Ask a beer person what craft means and they’ll say, ‘hell if I know’ or, less likely, something like ‘carefully made beer from a small producer’. Consult Merriam Webster or Oxford Dictionaries, and they’ll confirm: ‘a specialty beer made in small quantities’.

As to what the threshold for ‘small quantities’ is, who knows. But what we can surmise is the breweries Pete’s talking about — the Meantimes, the Sierra Nevadas, the Camdens — don’t exactly do things in small quantities. Add to that list BrewDog, who having demonised Camden for abandoning their principles as a small, independent brewer, are almost going that way themselves. BrewDog are so big now, they shipped 133,921 hectolitres of beer — equivalent to 23.5 million pints — last year and employed 540 people in order to do so.

BrewDog make good beers, and I enjoy a few, but you have to wonder, at what point does craft stop being craft? At what point in the company’s ever-increasing inflation does it say, ‘Hang on a minute. Guys, we should probably take the “ditch the mainstream” thing off our packaging now — it’s kinda ironic’? Add to this BrewDog’s ubiquity and penchant for aggressive marketing (I’m intimidated just referring to it), and you almost have the big brewer’s starter kit for consumer oppression.

The basis of this discussion so far has been on the fact — or more accurately, assumption — that a big brewer doesn’t have the necessary focus to create a delicious, consistent, and shortcut-free beer. Well, Budweiser, if you’ll bear with me, have proved to some degree that you can. As Pete suggested the other day, line up a beer from each of Bud’s 12 breweries in the US, and they’ll all taste the same. Which, I suppose, is a shame, seeing as drinking Bud is close to licking the inside of a drainpipe, but still — if the consistency’s there, and the brewery’s not willing to compromise on flavour, then we have a winning formula, don’t we?

Throughout this meandering nonsense, you may be wondering, ‘Who cares?’, ‘If it tastes alright, why does it matter?’, and ‘Why do we have this insatiable fixation with putting a name on everything?’ Well, the informal opinion is that that craft equals good. Of course, just buy putting ‘craft’ on your beer label doesn’t make it ‘good’ (I’m looking at you, Greene King), but craft to beer is kind of what cognac is to brandy. Drinkers like to have a suggestion of the quality and care that’s gone into a product, and if that suggestion is on a bottle of Old Speckled Hen, well, I’m afraid they’re going to be misled.

The beers Pete put in front of the hoteliers and restaurateurs the other day all had to be very good. They were. I established a new appreciation for Sierra Nevada, was reminded Meantime’s beers aren’t all that bad, and thanks to Smog Rocket made another exclusion to my general lack of appetite for roasted malts. As tempting as it is to disclude these brewers from the league of crafties due to their scale, one at least must be wary: a good beer isn’t necessarily a craft one, just as a craft beer isn’t necessarily a good one.

N.B. For a while now, BrewDog have tried to define craft themselves and, in wanting to address the problem of mislabelling, are aiming to make it official. Their proposed definition is a fair one, though it doesn’t say anything about the size of a brewery…