Happy Independents Day!

**De Garde (Tillamook)** | Breweries that exclusively make spontaneous beers? You know they’re independent.

My fellow Americans, on this 247th anniversary of our republic’s birth, let us salute our independent breweries. While the delicate fabric of the country may be fraying, our breweries, numbering more than 9,000, are vibrant and flourishing. 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 whose flagships have become national classics. These are the breweries that inspired an international shift to small-scale brewing, one that has revitalized beer after generations of bland uniformity.

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, however let’s use the day as an opportunity to celebrate the independent folks, those makers of the weird, wild, and wonderful. Freed from the pressure to appeal to millions of customers, they can let their own personalities shine. And that, far more than any discussion of ownership structures, is why we celebrate these 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. As we’ve seen in recent years, they can’t afford not to make alcoholic seltzers and sodas and coffees, either.

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 consumer niches too insignificant for big beer to notice. This freedom to brew created the explosive evolution and change that defines our times. 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 Strata and Citra double dry-hopped IPA if we’d left the market to Anheuser-Busch and Miller. We wouldn’t have seen Strata or Citra 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 American 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. Yet the styles that exist to today have champions in small, independent breweries, almost down to the last style.

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 bug.) 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 still be drinking 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 breweries or beers, never had so many flavors or colors or expressions as close as our local beer aisle or taproom. It is truly a wonderful era—and we owe it to the indies.

Let’s raise a glass to them today—