Here’s an interesting story that you may have missed this week. Fortune posted this article about an app that helps shoppers weed out the “crafty beers”. What are crafty beers you ask?
Simple, due to the continued sales decline for the big breweries while craft beer sales boom. The big breweries have taken to a new strategy of disguising their beer as a craft brew. This is done by either buying out small legitimate craft brewers or by setting up their own craft brands and trying to pass those off as new craft beer brews, hence the term “crafty”. This beer tends to not have the same love and passion of their craft beer counterpart, it lacks flavor and typically contains the same additives of the larger mass produced beer, which the industry is known for.
Enter Craft Check a new app developed by Barrett Garese and Rudy Jahchan that allows the user to scan the barcode and checks to see if that beer is either a craft beer or a crafty one. While the two state that this is a side project and that they hope to continue to develop the database and continue to help the little guys.
Download Craft Check from the AppStore. Read the original Fortune article – http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/05/crafty-new-beer-app-warns-of-big-brewer-ownership/
Easier to differentiate for US craft beers than in Europe. Slightly blurry lines here. Largeish regional breweries split opinion. However, more information can only be a good thing, although big breweries can make/own good tasting beers and some small independent brewers can make some bad beer!
It comes to no surprise that European breweries produce fine products and that both large and smaller breweries may produce flavourless beer. In North America, and specifically here in Canada, the corporate breweries do not put the same love care into their products. And I agree with you that not all craft breweries are equal or produce good beer. The globalization by the corporate beer industry has done a wonderful job of brining flavourless beer to the masses so much so that I believe the majority of beer purchasers have never had “real” beer.
Thanks so much for your comment.
A few thoughts on related topic here : http://www.beerwrangler.com/is-there-such-a-thing-as-craft-beer/
Great article @beerWrangler!