This reference will definitely give my age away...one of my favourite films as a kid was the Jim Henson classic, "The Dark Crystal". I also loved the Netflix prequel "Age of Resistance" and was heartbroken when the philistines in Scotts Valley cancelled it after a single season. I may have mentioned this before, but the mother of a friend was involved in the costume design of the original film, but that is irrelevant here.
If you haven't seen the film, then please do so, it is as I say an absolute classic, the basic premise is that in breaking the Crystal of Truth the UrSkeks split into two distinct races, the Skeksis and the UrRu, and it is at this point that using the Dark Crystal as my analogy of the beer world completely falls to pieces, like a Garthim at the end of the film - but heck, no analogy is perfect.
This post really has nothing to do with The Dark Crystal other than the fact that the existence of two distinct species where previously there was one came to mind as I mulled over the question "what is craft beer?"
Now, I have no interest in rehashing arguments about whatever small and independent means these days or whether certain business models are more "craft" than others, or even if ownership structures of the businesses making our favourite tipple have any real impact on the taste of the brew. It is very common though to hear the refrain, or at least some variant on it, "it's what's in the bottle that counts", and I think that phrase gets to the very core of how I have been feeling about the beer world for quite some time now.
I feel as though there is something of a parting of the ways in the offing between what I have started labelling in my own head "craft" beer versus "artisanal" beer. I am perfectly ok with the fact that "craft" and "artisanal" are largely synonymous, and there is an element of trying to define how many angels can dance on the head of a pin here, but I feel there is starting to be a divergence in perception, at least in my head, between "craft beer" and "artisanal beer".
When I think about what makes a beer "craft", my perception is broadly something that is distinctly "modern" - whether that be in the style, ingredients being used, the focus on being innovative, and using lots of what I would term non-standard ingredients, such as fruit syrups, breakfast cereals, sweets, and the like. In contrast, as I consider the concept of an "artisanal" beer my perception is one of being "old-fashioned" or traditional, again in terms of style, ingredients, and process. Of course there is a wealth of overlap between the two camps, after all it is a very rare brewery that can survive in the modern world by making a single beer.
I am perfectly happy to own the possibility that this mindset is purely a VelkyAl thing, and what is happening as I come to the latter stages of my 5th decade on earth is that I am not interested in chasing after whales any more. I actually have very little interest in trying every brewery in a 30 mile radius of my house, which is just as well as I haven't and I doubt I will ever bother. Even at the breweries I frequent on a regular basis there is often a choice between beers that I would label "craft" and those I would consider "artisanal", so this isn't a binary thing of "modern" bad, "traditional" good - traditions by definition change as they handed down through the generations.
Perhaps we should just give up on the adjectival epithets altogether and just drink beer that we like, regardless of how, who, and why it was made?
I've largely dropped the "craft" modifier from my beer writing of late, but that's mainly because I've been writing almost exclusively about European beer these past several years. But I think that these kinds of modifiers (be it craft, micro, artisanal, what have you) are useful heuristic devices, especially in North America. FWIW, "craft" arrived in places like Germany and Austria with much fanfare in the late naughts/early teens, but given some of the missteps (such as the occasional sub-par beer, which is a nail in the coffin in places where "mass-produced beer" is generally pretty good) craft has lost some of its luster and momentum of late. But I guess that's a different story.
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