Franconian Beer Message Board
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| Posted by Nick B. on 2013-02-01 03:30:58 |
| I'm torn on this issue. Yes, I want the traditional breweries to brew traditional beers well. But this gets boring, too, as there isn't AS much diversity between lagers as there is between other sorts of beer. There's the American use of the term "craft" beer, and there's the British use, IMO. In Yankley, it basically means "that which is not Budweiser/Miller/Coors/Pabst/Schlitz/et. al." That is, beer *not* like the adjunct-laden, bland, industrially-produced stuff advertised during (American) football games, but beer inspired by other interests than the least common denominators of price and flavour. In Britley, it seems to mean "beer brewed with different hops and stronger than it used to be, also often kegged, not casked". There is at least a utility for a term in the US, in order to differentiate kinds of beer like pale ale and porter from the likes of Bud Lite. Because the former is a rather new phenomenon. I've always said (going back nearly 20 years, since I first heard people starting to use the term) that we don't need *any* word for this. Pale ale, porter, stout, Vienna lager, Bock, etc., are *beer*, and that other cheap crap is cheap crap. Why do we (Yanks) have to use such a word? If you're telling a colleague at work about this great new beer you found at a pub last weekend, it will be fairly obvious that you're talking about something other than like what your father drank in 1974. The "craft" term, besides being misleading (hand crafted in millions of barrels a year?), gives an air of poshness or exclusivity that just isn't needed, especially if you're trying to appeal to Joe Sixpack to try pale ale instead of his normal Coors Lite. You Briten really don't need a word for this at all. You already have "lager" for the bland, "bottom"-fermented crap, you have ale for ale, and you have real ale for that, when appropriate. If someone at one tiny brewery plays around with different recipes and new hop varieties, does this make his beer any more "crafted" than another brewer at another tiny brewery who brews the same brown bitter recipe that his grandfather did (including #3 inversion sugar)? Yeah, this bee has been in my bonnet for a long time. It would be different if the use of "craft" had not originated by marketing people at large contract breweries. (I assume you meant to write "100+ years"?) |