The Craft Beer Renaissance

A "microbrewery" is a small brewery that produces no more than 30,000 barrels of beer annually. (Compare that with Anheuser-Busch which puts out over 100 million barrels annually.) Breweries this small had not successfully existed in America since before Prohibition, but the term came into wide usage in the later half of the 20th century to describe a new phenomenon in the American brewing industry - brewers using traditional methods to brew beer in small batches using the highest quality ingredients.

Fritz Maytag, a son of the family responsible for the famous appliance company, is almost universally considered the father of the microbrew revolution. Although 1980 is when the craft brewing renaissance took off, Maytag began "microbrewing" beer much earlier. In 1965, Maytag purchased the failing Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco and dedicated his brewing career to making the finest quality beers from the finest ingredients available. This was an extremely odd business model since most breweries at the time were searching for ways to make brewing less expensive. By 1975, when most of the beer brewed in America was a very pale, flavorless lager, Anchor was brewing its dark Porter, hoppy Liberty Ale and mind-numbing Old Foghorn Barley-Wine in addition to commencing its fantastic Our Special Ale holiday seasonal line. With the birth of the microbrewery, beer drinkers now had more to choose from than just one bland pilsner imitation or another. There were ales, pale ales, India pale ales, red ales, brown ales, old ales, mild ales as there had been in colonial America, but now there were fruit beers, wheat beers, bocks, porters, stouts and even a few rauchbiers among the styles available.

The craft beer renaissance began in California and spread from there. In 1980, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company began operations in Chico, CA while Red Hook Ale Brewery and Bert Grant's Yakima Brewing & Malting fired up the mash tuns in 1982. John Maier - a champion homebrewer - and Jack Joyce began the enterprise that would become Rogue Ales in Ashland, Oregon in 1988. In the late 1980's D.L. Geary Brewing began brewing in Maine as did Catamount Brewing in Vermont and Massachusetts Bay Brewing Company (known for the Harpoon brand) in Boston.

However, microbreweries were not the only manifestation of the revolution. "Brewpubs" - small breweries that served their beer on the premises, usually in addition to food - also emerged in the 1980's, the most popular of which was the Gordon Biersch brewpub chain born in Palo Alto, CA in 1988. In addition to microbreweries and brewpubs, the industry saw the birth of "contract breweries." The contract brewer didn't actually brew the beer and probably didn't even own so much as a mash paddle. He hired a real brewer to brew his beer under his label. In 1985, Jim Koch of Boston Beer Company began contract brewing and his world-famous Samuel Adams line of beers has made his company one of the top ten brewing companies in America today. F.X Matt Brewing Company - known for its Saranac line of beers - is actually one of the country's largest contract brewers.

The growth of the craft beer movement has forever altered the face of the American brewing industry. Whereas there were less than 50 breweries in America in 1980, over 500 existed by 1995 and nearly 1,500 existed by 2002. However, not all of the growth in the industry was in the microbrewery segment. Pennsylvania's Yuengling brand - brewed by D.G. Yuengling & Sons, America's oldest brewery founded in 1829 - grew nearly 600% in the 1990's. However, this paled in comparison to the 1000% growth of Samuel Adams and a staggering 1500% growth of Sierra Nevada. Dozens of microbreweries across the nations enjoyed profitable growth throughout the 1990's and into the 2000's. The minor recession of 1997 and 1998 forced some of the less well-established micros out of business, but dozens have emerged to replace them. The megabreweries have even attempted to cash in on the growing appreciation of fine, hand-crafted beers. For example, Anheuser-Busch has pitched in with their Michelob specialty beers line that includes a surprisingly tasty hefeweizen in addition to an amber bock, a black & tan and a märzen.

Although English- and German-inspired beers seem to dominate the market, one of the latest trends in the industry is imitating Belgian styles of beer. Many microbreweries produce a Belgian white ale or an abbey-style beer. New Belgium Brewing Company out of Fort Collins, Colorado was the 16th largest brewing company in the country as of 2000 producing 165,000 barrels.

This is the state of affairs in the American brewing industry today. No one knows were the future will lead, but it is clear that the leaders of the industry today are the craft brewers.