Brood: On the subject of Craft Beer

I distinctly remember something a music teacher once said, probably in my first music lesson at secondary school. He asked the class how many different kinds of music there were. Everyone inevitably started listing genres; rock, dance, classical and so on. Of course our teacher had a clever answer in mind. "There are two kinds of music. Good, and bad." I seem to remember quite a few of the class dismissed that as rubbish, and at the time I didn't really think much of it, but it stuck with me.

Nowadays I listen to a massive range of music: some of it produced in home studios, some of it produced using state of the art equipment; some released on tiny, independent labels, some released by the largest corporations; some of it barely known to anyone but the artists and their families, some of it even reached the top of the charts. The only thing that is important to me is whether it's good or not- the genre, and other labels applied to it are pretty much irrelevant.

I apply exactly the same thinking to beer. I'm quite happy to drink beer from the smallest and the largest breweries, regardless of the automation of their equipment, and the style of beer, as long as it's good.

Of course the problem with defining beer like this is that everyone's definition of good is different, but is this really a problem? After all, wouldn't the world be a boring place if everyone liked the same music? It would certainly make for less interesting conversation over a pint. Subjectivity is one thing that, in my opinion, makes beer, music, and life in general, interesting. That isn't to say that genre labels aren't useful though- it would be pretty tedious to describe music without using terms like rock and classical.

Yet the term "craft beer" isn't a genre label any more than "independently released" is when applied to music. It might describe the brewery that made the beer, yet it seems to imply that anything brewed outside the definition is somehow inferior; it might describe the dedication and passion of the brewers, but that implies that brewers of "non-craft" beers are less dedicated or passionate.

I take a more inclusive view of things: while I mostly prefer to drink beer that would fall into the "craft" bracket, I understand that a lot of people don't, and while I do like introducing people to beers that they wouldn't normally drink, I try not to be too evangelical about it.
Having said that, I can understand why people do see it as their mission to educate people about beer- after all, Brewdog wouldn't be very convincing punks if they didn't gob on the establishment (metaphorically speaking) once in a while. Perhaps, bearing in mind the hostility that some people seem to show towards beer in general, and often other alcoholic drinks as well, we should be sticking together rather than drawing lines, especially ones that are fairly arbitrary? As Voltaire almost certainly didn't say: “I disapprove of what you drink, but I will defend to the death your right to drink it.”