That left The Commons in a no-man's land. They made unusual beers that never catered to mass tastes, which necessarily limited their audience. But they didn't send the simultaneous message that the beer was a rare and special treat that drinkers might have to stretch to appreciate.
Read MoreI was interested in two very basic questions: 1) Did breweries believe it was important for consumers to know about breweries' independence?, and 2) were they planning to use the seal? I canvassed a half dozen breweries of different sizes from different parts of the country and got responses from four--Ninkasi (OR) and Harpoon (MA), large craft breweries, Port City (VA), a medium-sized brewery, and Gigantic (OR), a small brewery.
Read MoreIt's a remarkable beer. I mean really remarkable. I was hanging out with friends who were helping me work through some of that backlog, and it stopped two or three people in their tracks.
Read MoreSpecialty coffee--the equivalent to craft beer--is now consumed by more than half the drinkers in America daily. Daily! Equally remarkably, this has doubled in seven years. I remember the first Starbucks in Portland--it arrived in about 1987. We'd already had craft beer, but specialty coffee as a national phenomenon actually got an earlier start. Like beer, we imagine the trajectory of adoption was a good deal more quick than it was. I'd have guessed specialty-coffee saturation had already plateaued by the mid-aughts. Instead, what happened was a much slower change followed a sea change. The tipping point happened somewhere in the past decade, after which specialty coffee went from being, well, specialty, to completely bog-standard mundane. Everyone drinks Starbucks now.
Read MoreLast week we learned that Peter Bouckaert was leaving his post as New Belgium brewmaster to start a small, new brewery. This is far from unprecedented. Larry Sidor turned Deschutes into a regional powerhouse; in 2012, he left to start Crux Fermentation Project. More recently, Stone's Mitch Steele left to start New Realm in Atlanta.
Read MoreLast week, AB InBev (ABI) made news (and sparked anxiety) by buying Asheville's Wicked Weed brewery. This week they've caused even more anxiety when news broke that they had seized the entire crop of South African hops. Dozens of stories have been written about it, and breweries have been shooting off angry emails all week.
Read MoreHere's the thing: breweries are unusual businesses. They make a product to which their customers have a strong sense of emotion. This long predates craft beer--for generations, people have attached themselves to Miller or Hamm's or Budweiser with something like the zeal they favor their hometown baseball teams
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