‘Microbrew’ a big deal again
Beer Advocate fest celebrates world’s best small-batch masters
The term “microbrew” is back — at least for one weekend — as the nation's best small breweries hit Boston tomorrow and Saturday for the first Beer Advocate Microbrew Invitational at the Seaport World Trade Center.
“All phrases seem to have a life cycle and `microbrew' was one of them,” said Will Meyers, the longtime brew-master at Cambridge Brewing Co. in Cambridge's Kendall Square. “Somewhere along the way we discovered the term `craft' was a more elegant description of what we we're doing while distancing ourselves from the international industrial brewers.” Two decades ago almost all of what we now call craft beer was labeled microbrew. The term at the time had a strict meaning: a microbrewery was one that produced less than 10,000 barrels of beer per year.
The phrase still has a technical definition in the industry — less than 15,000 barrels per year. But the term largely disappeared in more recent times — used only by folks 20 years behind the times — especially as the beer scene exploded and so many beer makers blew past the tiny threshold of microbrew-dom.
“A lot of people began to question the micro-ness of a brewery that had grown into a significant factory turning out a lot of beer,” said Meyers.
The Microbrew Invitational returns the focus to those beer makers that remain devoted to the more artisanal beers at the root of the craft beer phenomenon. Local participants include Bent Water Brewing Co. of Lynn, Brazo Fuerte Artisanal Beer of Watertown and Mystic Brewery of Chelsea, where Meyers was brewing some of his bottled product this week.
Each of the 70 breweries involved has crafted a special microbrew just for the event.
Meyers and Cambridge Brewing Co. teamed up with Valley Malt of Hadley to brew a unique version of gose — a Germanstyle beer traditionally flavored with coriander and salt. The CBC version is brewed with malted sunflower seeds, lightly salted, and dubbed Bullpen Hijinks.
“It totally tastes like summer,” boasted Meyers.
Brothers Todd and Jason Alstrom launched the influential BeerAdvocate.com here in Boston in 1996 and run some of the nation's most popular beer festivals. They said the new microbrew focus marks a return to their roots.
“Before `craft beer,' waiting in lines, anti-social ticking, hoarding, hipsters, neckbeards, trolls and selling out plagued the beer scene, there was microbrewing,” said Todd Alstrom in a Beer Advocate.com statement. “We're talking old-school, small-batch brewing that my brother Jason and I cut our teeth on 20-odd years ago.”