Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out by Josh Noel

Once they cease to operate independently, do they still count as craft? Goose Island was the first to sell out to Anheuser-Busch InBev, in 2011, but the megacorporation has acquired another nine craft breweries since then, making the matter increasingly pressing. The question at the core of the debate-and the book-is whether it matters who owns craft breweries. But when there are no wrong answers, there are no right answers, and the Brewers Association sought to correct that.” Everyone was included-except for Big Beer. In the early years of the craft brewing renaissance, he says, the term was never really defined. Noel happens to be discussing the attempts of the Brewers Association to define craft beer-which has become an increasingly thorny question as more craft breweries have been bought by global beverage companies (often referred to as Big Beer). The line isn’t an introduction to his subject matter (it actually comes near the end of the book), but it does encapsulate it fairly neatly. “There wasn’t a single moment when the chummy, jovial craft beer industry became a battlefield of ‘us versus them,'” Josh Noel writes in Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business (Chicago Review Press). Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.Get your Best of Chicago tickets! Ticket prices go up May 15 > Close

Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out by Josh Noel