Craft Brewing Philosophy Across the Generations
All About Beer hosts a long-running series called “Brewer to Brewer,” where one brewer interviews a colleague, who in turn interviews another colleague in the next episode. The fission that results from two colleagues chatting is occasionally very interesting (brewers are not journalists, and so other times it can get wander-y), as it was when Gigantic’s Van Havig interviewed Von Ebert’s Sam Pecoraro. They are different generations of brewers, and Van came to the discussion with a plan to interrogate that gap. He started this way:
“So when I started brewing [in the mid-1990s], the thing that got a lot of people my age into brewing was that beer had become so industrialized. There was this belief that breweries were just big chemical factories.
“And a lot of what that original craft movement was about, at least my perception, is it was deindustrializing. You're bringing beer production back to kind of a human scale, right? And things like hop oil in the ‘90s were anathema to what we felt we were doing…. I feel that especially among younger brewers, those concepts are like completely out the window.”
t is typical for members of older generations to feel unmoored by the ways of the young, so Van was interested to find out how the philosophy of younger brewers motivated them.
It went from the abstract to the concrete with Van’s first example—GMO yeast. Van took the con position, arguing, “Well, my issue with them is a little more brewer-philosophical.” Referring to the GMO yeast that has been engineered to remove the genes that produce diacetyl, he said: “For me, I'm like: shouldn't you be a better brewer than to need that? I mean, how many breweries really need to worry about a couple of days [to clear the diacetyl using traditional methods]?”
That captures, in just a few words, the basic orientation of brewers who came into the industry 30 years ago. They felt like the work they did was a corrective to the chemical workarounds big brewers used to drive costs down. For the first two generations, the purpose of the small-scale brewer was to restore some of the craft and ingenuity of the individual to the process and make more natural, honest beers.
But for Sam, who started brewing a decade and a half after Van (around 2011), casting this as a philosophical issue missed the mark.
“I think that's a bit of a straw man. Nobody's claiming ‘always take the easy way out.’ But there are some things that I think are low-hanging fruit that might be really advantageous to your production schedule [using this yeast].”
After some back and forth, Sam continued: “But I do want to make a point on the [diacetyl-free yeast] thing, right? So I can't remember where I heard it, but David Walker had this awesome quote about great brewers controlling all inputs. And when you think about like, oh, a couple of days in a tank, right? That's not just tank time. That's not fermentation capacity. That's also labor. That's energy efficiency. Yeah, there's a lot more to it than just tank time.”
I wish they’d been able to stay on the topic a little longer, because there are a bunch of issues I would have loved them both to address—artificial flavors, terpenes, hop products, but also decoction mashing, whole cone hops, or lab-cultured “wild yeast.” Where does the “right” line lie between authenticity and artifice? They might have touched on the light beer Von Ebert makes (Clubhaus), which just won the gold at the World Beer Cup. That style of beer is a completely normal product to small-scale brewers in 2025, but would have been hugely controversial to them twenty years ago.
These issues don’t have a right or wrong answer. But Van was onto something when he observed that generations have definite bents. I would quickly paraphrase them this way:
The pioneer cohort (late ‘70s to mid-90s) was 100% committed to traditional brewing. They weren’t necessarily clear about what that meant or how to practice it, but as a matter of philosophy, they felt it was the key point of distinction with industrially-produced lagers. They expected to make no money, so they could afford to be purists. One of the watershed moments for me was reading a description about the McMenamins’ approach to beer on their menus in the 1980s. It was before the language of hand-crafting beer, but that’s basically how they described it, and they proudly embraced batch-to-batch variability. Inconsistency was a marker of their authenticity.
The second cohort, (early to mid-90s to around 2010) was the first to professionalize the industry. This is Van’s cohort. They had some of the pioneer’s devotion to tradition, but this was the first generation to see something critical in really well-made beer. Brewers were concerned with good practices and equipment, getting rid of off-flavors that were increasingly not treated as cute quirks by consumers, and solid business practices. That was especially true after 2000, when the industry was on the skids. This group was still philosophically aligned with the pioneer cohort in terms of fidelity to "authentic" practices and ingredients, and held big beer in some comtempt. This was, for example, the cohort that got into organic brewing.
The third cohort (~2010 to around 2022) was shortened by Covid. This generation of brewers was raised with craft beer and didn't have the same revolutionary zeal of earlier cohorts. Beer was beer. Because things were exploding experimentally, they crossed a bunch of lines earlier generations wouldn't have considered—like industrial flavor products, CRISPRed yeasts, and any additive that would create a stir with their consumers. The philosophy of this generation was innovation and inventiveness, which led to a sense that sacred cows were there to be slaughtered. They were wholly irreverent in their regard of older craft generations. Because craft beer was exploding in popularity, they could afford to be irreverent—and indeed irreverence was good business. Older brewers (and writers) allowed their upper lips to curl a little bit in disdain for this view, but it led to a paradoxical impulse to pursue super-traditional European brewing methods discarded by earlier cohorts. irreverence led away from and back to tradition.
Finally, we had the abrupt start of the Covid cohort in about 2022, when it was clear there would be no snap-back to the glorious days of the third cohort. These breweries have been propelled by a poverty mentality. Basically: do whatever you can to survive. Philosophy is great, but philosophy doesn't keep the lights on. It's a fascinating inversion of the first gen, who also had a poverty mentality but sort of reveled in it. Old dairy tanks and castoff grundies? Awesome! Not sure if I can make payroll? Hey, that's what I signed up for! But thanks to the generations that followed the first gen, the idea of de-professionalizing just isn’t conceivable. In some sense, most breweries have become Covid cohort brewers. This generation will become a more coherent force in the next decade when they find their footing, and they will dictate the shape of the industry in the 2030s.
Sam’s reply to Ben was genial and not meant as a rebuke. (Brewing remains fundamentally an oral tradition, and it’s one of those cool industries in which the elders get a lot of respect.) And yet within it we can see the contours of a different kind of philosophy. The current generation doesn’t carry the old antipathy to “big beer.” They are attuned to the issues of their day—how to improve efficiency not just to maximize profits, but pay workers more and use less energy. In fact, the word “efficiency” isn’t a terrible entry point for this whole discussion. It served as a shibboleth to the first generations of small brewers. In it they saw everything evil about big beer. But for more recent breweries, it’s a value-neutral way to describe one of the many variables in a brewhouse—and a means to an entirely different end than foreseen by Anheuser-Busch in the 1970s.
Each new generation learns from and reacts to its elders and the context it emerges from. This is another reason there is no “craft beer.” We’re four cohorts into the small brewery era, and that means many views, and many philosophies. Each generation also lives in tension with the others. The pendulum swings between valuing processes that maximize money at the expense of character, and unnecessary traditions that bind a brewers hand.
I’d love to hear more of these inter-generational discussions. They don’t lead us to any deep truths about beer or brewing, but they can reveal a lot about how and why the people making our beer are making it the way they do.