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05-08-2016, 06:17
Visit the Pete Brown's Beer Blog site (http://petebrown.blogspot.com/2016/08/stop-presses-definition-of-craft-beer.html)
Yet again, I'm in the middle of writing a piece that addresses the idea that craft beer is 'a meaningless term,' that 'craft beer' doesn't exist because it had no precise, technical definition.
To argue the point I'm making, I hauled out my massive copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to look at the definition of the word 'craft.' And lo and behold, just below the three different definitions of 'craft', the next entry is 'craft beer'!
So according to the OED:
'craft beer (also craft brew) noun (US) a beer with a distinctive flavour, produced and distributed in a particular region.'
I kinda like that. You may not. I think it gets to the point of what it's all about. You may disagree with it, you may think it's incomplete, you may think it misses the point. I really don't care. Because craft beer has a strict tight, pithy definition, created by the people whose job it is to define what words mean. This is the definition of craft beer whether you like it or not. If you disagree, you might as well argue with the definitions of the words 'cramp,' 'cranial,' 'crannog' or 'crap hat.'
This may not solve many of the issues in craft beer, but it does hopefully mean an end to the fatuous argument that the problem with craft beer is its lack of a strict definition. If you have a problem with craft beer, it's probably not about the definition of the word, but about what you feeling being done to the concept.
By the way, my personal big-ass copy of the Oxford English Dictionary was published in 2003, so (a) apologies to anyone for whom this is old news and (b) that means craft beer has had a definition all this time we've been arguing over whether it does to not. Tchoh!
More... (http://petebrown.blogspot.com/2016/08/stop-presses-definition-of-craft-beer.html)
Yet again, I'm in the middle of writing a piece that addresses the idea that craft beer is 'a meaningless term,' that 'craft beer' doesn't exist because it had no precise, technical definition.
To argue the point I'm making, I hauled out my massive copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to look at the definition of the word 'craft.' And lo and behold, just below the three different definitions of 'craft', the next entry is 'craft beer'!
So according to the OED:
'craft beer (also craft brew) noun (US) a beer with a distinctive flavour, produced and distributed in a particular region.'
I kinda like that. You may not. I think it gets to the point of what it's all about. You may disagree with it, you may think it's incomplete, you may think it misses the point. I really don't care. Because craft beer has a strict tight, pithy definition, created by the people whose job it is to define what words mean. This is the definition of craft beer whether you like it or not. If you disagree, you might as well argue with the definitions of the words 'cramp,' 'cranial,' 'crannog' or 'crap hat.'
This may not solve many of the issues in craft beer, but it does hopefully mean an end to the fatuous argument that the problem with craft beer is its lack of a strict definition. If you have a problem with craft beer, it's probably not about the definition of the word, but about what you feeling being done to the concept.
By the way, my personal big-ass copy of the Oxford English Dictionary was published in 2003, so (a) apologies to anyone for whom this is old news and (b) that means craft beer has had a definition all this time we've been arguing over whether it does to not. Tchoh!
More... (http://petebrown.blogspot.com/2016/08/stop-presses-definition-of-craft-beer.html)