[Beer Lecture] Chapter 34. The Three Whales of the Craft Revolution
In those five decades that passed since Maytag reinvented The Anchor Brewing Company, the craft movement made a huge step forward and is nowadays a large heterogenous subculture. Describing all the styles, trends, and tendencies in craft brewing is rather a dead cause as new ones occur at a much faster pace than the author of this book’s writings.
Frankly speaking, we don’t actually aim to describe every existing kind of beer. As we told readers many times in the previous chapters, beer is a democratic beverage. For many years already the credo of a true beer lover is very simple: drink local beer. Drink what is made here and now.
Still, to help you, dear reader, to navigate the modern craft scene, let us describe the main trends — the ‘three whales’ of craft brewing.
This is Chapter 34 of my free book on beer history and historical beers. If you like the book, could you please rate it on Amazon and/or Goodreads.
1. Preserving cultural tradition
Craft enthusiasts do love history and made great efforts to preserve and revive it. From porter, pale ale, and lambic — to Dutch kuyt, German mumme, and Ancient Egyptian zythos; from authentic British pubs to hoary Norwegian village breweries. There are practical researchers among modern historians who not only read the elder annals but reenact Medieval technology to clarify dubious and obscure wording. We described many such reconstructions in the Part I of this book.
2. Brewing bitter beers
Breeding hops and making bitter ales with them is the signature trademark of the craft subculture. IPA and its derivatives continue to reign over craft beer styles both in terms of popularity and sales. Since the 90s, countless variations of the recipe were invented:
- Double / Triple / Imperial IPA, with its high alcoholic content increased; history started in 1994 when the Russian River Brewing Company created ‘Pliny the Elder’ — the first modern strong IPA;
- Black IPA, made with an addition of dark or black malt; invented by the Vermont Pub & Brewery at the beginning of the 90s;
- Belgian IPA, brewed with Belgian yeast strains; first made by Belgian brewery ‘Urthel’ after its brewmaster toured the US in 2005;
- New England / Vermont / East Coast / Hazy / Juicy / DDH IPA — see the previous chapter;
- Brut IPA, a full antithesis to the previous one — a crystal clear beer with all the sugars and other residual compounds removed; invented by the Social Kitchen and Brewery in 2010;
- Sour and ‘Wild’ IPA, fermented with Brettanomyces / Lactobacillus / packages of microorganisms akin to Belgian spontaneously fermented beers; introduced by New Belgium Brewing in 2011;
- Red, Brown, Rye, and White IPA, brewed with amber, brown, rye, and wheat malt respectively;
- Session / ‘Micro’ IPA, with its alcoholic content reduced down to 4% / 2% ABV respectively.
3. Experimenting!
As one might have guessed from the previous paragraph, experimenting with recipes is like catnip for a craft brewer. It was imaginers from the Goose Island brewery who set the fashion in the early 90s by inventing bourbon barrel-aged stouts — which are now solidly occupying the rating tops.
If you subscribe to some craft beer resource maillist, you will soon discover quite a lot of novelties. The last such a maillist the author of this book got included the proposal to try:
- barleywine aged in rum barrels;
- sour ales with blueberries and raspberries;
- Imperial desert stout;
- tripel with cardamom, orange zest, and coriander;
- lassi gose — literally, sour salty beer prepared like the Indian beverage lassi, utilizing mango puree, yogurt, and Lactobacillus;
- Imperial gose with raspberries, peanut butter, vanilla, and lactose;
- ‘smoky’ quadrupel.
And I may assure you that some of those beverages deserve your attention!
Then you… win?
As the 1960s were the worst time for a beer lover to live, the 2020s look like the best of all possible worlds. According to the BeerAdvocate annual report, they counted 20 thousand breweries in the world (half of them outside the cradle of the craft revolution — the United States of America). And if this number is actually comparable to what we had a the beginning of the 20th century, another figure is completely mind-blowing: in 2020 alone more than 67 thousand new beers hit the market[1].
Still, the full victory is definitely not achieved yet. Despite the impressive numbers, the share of ‘non-mainstream’ beer in total sales is embarrassingly low (12% in the US, even lower than that in other countries). The bad news is that this share is actually decreasing slowly[2]. The ‘Big Brewers’ continue the endless process of mergers & acquisitions, protracting more and more former craft breweries into their gravity wells. Many major brands in the craft beer market lost their independency years ago: AB InBev controls Goose Islands and many smaller producers, Heineken owns Lagunitas, Kirin Brewing Company — New Belgium and Brooklyn Brewery, Sapporo Breweries — Unibroue and the legendary Anchor Brewing Company.
Will we end this book with this premonitory remark? Well, we actually do believe that the future diversity of our beloved drink is safe — while there are people who prefer real tasteful beers over identical insipid chemical compounds. And we hope that, after reading this book, there is one more such a person in the world.
