How the World’s Biggest Brewer Killed the Craft Beer Buzz
Is the party over for indie suds?
Steve Luke had plenty to smile about. Cloudburst Brewing, the tiny craft brewery he founded two years earlier in Seattle, had just won a bronze medal at the 2018 Great American Beer Festival in Denver. It was recognition on craft beer’s biggest stage — basically the Oscars of beer — but Luke, a lanky brewing virtuoso with a shoulder-length mane and a righteous beard, wasn’t content to bask. As the cameras clicked, he unbuttoned his plaid shirt to reveal another shirt beneath it that read in big, red block letters, “FUCK A-B INBEV.”
There was a quick chuckle in the crowd. Luke left the stage, and the ceremony rolled on.
In one sense, this was nothing new. A generation of independent brewers built craft beer partly by vilifying Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI), the world’s biggest beer company, formed in 2008 when the Belgian-Brazilian juggernaut InBev purchased St. Louis’ Anheuser-Busch for $52 billion. It was good for business, a form of commercialized dissent. People could stick it to The Man — those soulless and tasteless swill-peddlers — just by drinking beer they liked. Drinkers and brewers alike started using words like “movement,” “renaissance,” “rebellion,” and “revolution” to describe America’s craft brewing culture. Quality and…
