Craft brewers hit out against fake brewers
Beer promoters without their own brewery have been called various names: from beer firms, gypsies and virtuals to cuckoos, imposters, pseudos and fakes. The connotations attached to each name, ranging from the neutral to the pejorative, are far from accidental.
The choice in terminology is ideologically motivated because at stake is “authenticity”, the craft beer industry’s battle cry usually lodged against the Big Brewers. But, as the Belgian example shows, it can also be directed at promoters deemed heretical or fraudulent for one reason or another.
A few years ago, at the Beer Bloggers conference in Brussels, there was an angry debate over whether Mikkel Borg Bjergsø, the man behind Mikkeller, may be called a brewer at all. At the time Mikkeller did not own a brewery (today they own the old AleSmith brewery in San Diego and a brewpub in New York City) but had their beers produced by others. Mikkel has never denied his business practices but said he preferred to call himself a gypsy brewer (no one seems to object to the term’s racist implications).
The audience was probably too young to remember but, when craft beer took off in the US in the 1980s, Jim Koch (the founder of Boston Beer) and Pete Sloshberg (the founder of Pete’s Wicked Ale) had all their beers contract brewed without coming clean as to where it was done. In those days, being an authentic craft brewer, obviously, did not require baring it all.
The issue – real brewers vs. beer firms – flared up again at the Brewers of Europe Forum, which was held in Brussels recently (7-8 June 2018), when Belgian craft brewers lashed out against those whom they call “fake brewers”.
Like free-riders, those fake brewers are accused of seeking to benefit from the interest in craft beer generated by real brewers (with their own brewery) while being skilfully economical with the truth as to where their beer comes from. Some are even accused of claiming to own a brewery whereas, in fact, they do not.
The number of breweries in Belgium, which are members of the Brewers Association, has risen to over 200 in 2016 from 123 in 2009. Of the estimated 150 start-ups, 40 percent are believed to be beer firms. But if numbers keep rising, the split between firms and real breweries could be 50:50 soon.
The arguments by Belgian craft brewers against beer firms should be noted.
In their opinion, beer firms fool the consumer and render harm to the very notion of craft, which in their hands becomes devoid of any meaning. Craft is here taken to mean craftsmanship and creative spirit. Accordingly, craft brewers possess real skills and make their beers themselves while choosing the technology they want to use.
Equally worrying to them is that beer firms, perhaps even unintentionally, help standardise the taste of Belgian beer, since the breweries which produce these contract beers inevitably put their own stamp on everything they produce.
Ultimately, real Belgian craft brewers consider the practices by beer firms a major threat to Belgian beer and its world-wide reputation. As they wrote in an Open Letter, “in time, the words ‘Made in Belgium’ on a label will be stripped of all meaning, since the beer in the bottle may well have been manufactured by experts who might as well be situated anywhere on the planet, and marketed by salesmen who have turned impersonation into an economic model.”
In a novel twist they call on regulators to impose on any brewer the duty of transparency. In concrete terms, this means the clear and visible mention on each label where the beer in question was actually made. Also, they want to reserve the legal term “brewery” only for those companies that possess their own equipment for the brewing of beer and use it to manufacture their entire output.
Indeed, this is a novel twist because the call to full transparency has to date only been directed by craft brewers against the Big Brewers and their “crafty” brands.
The Open Letter was published by the newspaper Le Soir and can be found – in English translation – at
As far as we can see, craft brewers in the rest of the world have not engaged in battle against beer firms yet. In Italy, for example, there are an estimated 200+ beer firms out of 900+ craft brewers. The reason why there are no internal squabbles is that Italian craft brewers are primarily concerned with providing an alternative to wine. Therefore, it is more important for them to join forces than engage in internecine warfare.
But if authenticity and transparency really matter, then full disclosure about a beer’s origin should not be a problem, one likes to think.
What the Belgian debate underlines is this: language matters, not least since it delineates and cements the canyon between real craft beer and those deemed non-craft.
