Happy Independents Day

**Machine House (Seattle)** | Don’t expect big breweries to offer this selection of cask ale.

My fellow Americans, on this 246th anniversary of our republic’s birth, I come to praise our independent breweries. While the delicate fabric of the country may be fraying, the state of our breweries is strong. Numbering more than 9,000, they are vibrant and flourishing—with more today than at any time in those two and a half centuries. Among them you will find every kind of beer and brewing process: fierce defenders of tradition or restless experimenters, tinkerers making obscure styles on bespoke systems, or regional powers striving for quality and consistency. These are the breweries that inspired an international shift to small-scale brewing, one that has revitalized beer after generations of bland mediocrity.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with large breweries. Some folks take a moralistic approach to brewery ownership and judge multinational beverage companies harshly. (There are even entire organizations devoted to this project.) People have been complaining about the threat of big breweries for a thousand years. Instead of complaints, let’s turn to celebration—and to those family-owned breweries.

When I’m standing in a family-owned brewery in Europe that dates back seven or eight generations, or I’m listening to an American brewer tell me a new process I’ve never encountered, I can’t help but be compelled by their value to the beer world. Freed from the pressure to appeal to millions of customers, they can let their own personalities shine. So much of what we love about beer comes from passion and quirkiness of independent breweries.

Preservation and Innovation

Large, mass-market breweries are concerned with selling a lot of beer. They need to offer products that the largest number of consumers will buy at the right price point. Their scale and integration make them the ultimate aggregator: the beers that are churned from their factories are proven winners. Big breweries can’t afford to make unpopular beers.

Little breweries offer the inverse set of strengths. They can experiment on a beer that has no obvious market. They make beer in small enough volumes and target small enough niches that a batch of beer is never much of a risk. That circumstance has led to explosive evolution and change. When you look at the developments that have characterized the craft beer era in the US, they all came from little independent breweries. We would never have seen a Mosaic-hopped IPA if we’d left the market to Anheuser-Busch and Miller. We wouldn’t have seen Mosaic hops, either.

Paradoxically, brewing traditions are also protected by little breweries that refuse to modernize, mechanize, and follow trends. In the second half of the 20th century, as mass market lagers began to dominate the world beer market, independent breweries kept traditional styles alive. Imagine where we’d be if lambic breweries had closed up shop as they were teetering on the brink 50 years ago. The whole enterprise of using wild yeasts may have lost to us. What if traditional brewing had died in Britain? What beer would those early breweries have made; would we have ever gotten to IPAs? Many current styles exist solely because a handful of breweries making the last examples refused to abandon them. (In some cases it got down to a single brewery). Our list of styles is far smaller than it might have been—so many of the old ones did die out, taking traditions with them. The styles that exist to today have champions in small, independent breweries.

Little breweries have big opinions. Brewer-led breweries think about the beer, not the marketing campaign. The questions they ask relate to making the beer better or more characterful or more interesting. When breweries get bigger, particularly when they become global corporations, the thinking shifts to “liquid streams” and “product.” The companies are far too big to reflect the idiosyncrasies of a brewer’s vision. Many people are involved in every decision, no matter how small, so that all the quirks are smoothed out of the system. (Of course, that’s a feature, not a big.) Global breweries can be optimized to make beer of exceptional quality; they almost never make the most interesting beer. The ideal arrangement for a big brewery is a gigantic market for a single beer, one that can be made, packaged, delivered, and marketed with single-minded efficiency. While that may be a great business model, had we left matters in their hands we’d have a single, boring commodity and nobody would care about beer.

So today, as you undoubtedly hoist a cold one, spend a moment thinking about your local independent. In the long history of our country, we have never had more choice of brewer or beer, never had so many flavor or types of beer as close as our corner beer aisle. It is truly a wonderful era—and we owe it to the indies.

Happy independents day, my friends—