Pic(k) of the Week: Drinking Budweiser & Heineken?

Requiem for two heavyweights?

Two non-'craft' beers from two breweries who until recently had been considered 'craft,' but now not. Left to right:

• Fille de Ferme
  Brewed by Wicked Weed Brewing of Asheville, North Carolina.
  (Purchased by Anheuser-Busch InBev in May 2017.)
  • 4.2% alcohol-by-volume (abv)
  • "Foeder-rested, brettanomyces farmhouse ale. Fermented with honeysuckle and fresh orange zest."
• IPA
  Brewed by Lagunitas of Petaluma, California.
  (Purchased by Heineken in May 2017.)

  • 6.5% abv.
  • 51.5 International Bittering Units (IBUs).

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What is 'craft' beer? Formalistically speaking.

The [U.S.] Brewers Association —the trade association which bills itself as "the not-for-profit trade group dedicated to promoting and protecting America’s small and independent craft brewers"— has 'kicked out' several member breweries when they no longer comported with the association's (changing) definition of what a craft brewery was.

Currently, the BA holds that ...

an American craft brewer is small, independent, and traditional.

• Small:
  Annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less (approximately 3 percent of U.S. annual sales). Beer production is attributed to the rules of alternating proprietorships.
• Independent:
  Less than 25 percent of the craft brewery is owned or controlled (or equivalent economic interest) by a beverage alcohol industry member that is not itself a craft brewer.
• Traditional:
  A brewer that has a majority of its total beverage alcohol volume in beers whose flavor derives from traditional or innovative brewing ingredients [emphasis mine] and their fermentation. Flavored malt beverages (FMBs) are not considered beers.

It's that definition of 'independent' that, in May, the BA employed to knock-out Lagunitas and Wicked Weed. Notwithstanding —at Thinking Man Tavern, in Decatur, Georgia, on 13 July 2017— both beers, née 'craft,' still went down damn tasty.

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• In June 2017, the BA began the "Certified Independent Craft Beer Seal, a campaign to identify, for consumers, beers brewed by "independent" breweries. In the UK, the Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) has done likewise, in July 2017, with its Assured Independent British Craft Brewer scheme.


• Pic(k) of the Week: one in a weekly series of photos taken (or noted) by me, posted on Saturdays, and often, but not always, with a good fermentable as the subject.
• See the photo on Flickr: here.
• Camera: Olympus Pen E-PL1.
• Commercial reproduction requires explicit permission, as per Creative Commons.


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