An Ankoù
Landlord.
I know, and, yes, you're right. I know lots of excellent microbreweries; Downton and Hopback being two of my favourites. It's the "Craft allows you to stick another £ on a bottle" that sticks in my throat.Funny story there....
You see, here in the UK we have quite a long home brewing history, and well this chappy sort of introduced this to the US (where there beer was pretty awful...). Only, when it got over there it REALLY took off (the commercial beer been so bad), and those home brewers were suddenly able to scale up to commercial (or "craft") brewers. The idea spread back over here, and home brewers here started scaling up and going into business too, and weee, we had craft brewers too... Thing is, like anything, when something becomes popular the big boys get hunger in their eyes, and came a-calling... They either started producing their own "craft" beer (which was just their own pish, with craft written on the label), or they bought up the smaller operations and took them into the big time (Campden and Meantime come to mind). Then you get the guys who just kept growing and growing (Brewdog), and as often happens, as the scale of their operations grew, the quality of the product well that didn't quite do so well...
We do actually still have plenty of good quality micro-breweries over here too, many who don't even use the label "craft" on their products, and yet produce fantastic beer, sometimes they don't even charge a fortune for their beer (incidentally Brewdog stuff isn't even all that expensive). One of the worst beers I've ever tasted was actually from one of the supposedly "genuine" craft beer producers and was a DIPA, it tasted like a Youngs kit beer....So I guess when those particular "home brewers" scaled up, they just scaled up how many kits they were making at one time.....
There's a microbrewery revolution over here, too. By and large it focuses on image and marketing, with product coming in a late third. I can only speak for my locality, not for the whole country, of course.
