Microbrewery, a small brewery making craft brewed beer that is largely consumed outside the brewery premises. Although different people and organizations have various ideas of where to draw the borders regarding the size limit of a microbrewery, almost everyone agrees that breweries producing less than 12,000 hl (about 10,000 US barrels) seem to fit the description. If the brewery sells the vast majority of its beer on the premises, it’s usually termed a “brewpub” rather than a microbrewery, although many breweries wear both hats. Because many of these once-tiny breweries have grown over the past 30 years, the term “microbrewery” has slowly faded in favor of the term “craft brewery,” particularly in the United States. Microbreweries often seem like a modern concept to non-Europeans, but the fact is that all breweries were once home breweries (the old British alehouses), brewpubs (the well-established German Bräustüberl), or what we would now call microbreweries. It was only in the 1700s that the Industrial Revolution advanced technology sufficiently to make large-scale brewing a practical and profitable enterprise. By the mid 1800s, both large and small breweries had proliferated throughout Europe and the United States.

The Carolina Brewery team in its Pittsboro, North Carolina, brewhouse, which uses a fifteen-barrel brewing system. joshua weinfeld

The term “microbrewery” is of recent coinage, even if the concept is not. As small breweries started popping up in the UK in the 1970s, the word “microbrewery” came to describe the scrappy entrepreneur creating boldly flavorful new beers out of a small building or a shed. In those days, there was no small brewing equipment available, so microbrewers built systems out of old dairy equipment and bought cast-off small tanks from big brewers. The Grundy tank, a small, squat vessel designed by large breweries to be serving tanks for big city pubs, became the mainstay of many small breweries. See grundy tanks. They held 5 UK barrels of beer (about 7 US barrels) and could be used as fermenters, conditioning tanks, bright tanks, or all three. Better yet, the big brewers were phasing them out, and they were therefore cheap. People built their own mash tuns or contracted welders to make them. In the early days, yeast was usually borrowed from other breweries or bought in dried form, but commercial yeast banks soon provided a range of different yeasts for brewers to work with. See yeast bank. The brewer himself was often a homebrewer who had gotten fired up by the idea that he could brew something truly special. It took galvanizing will to prove it, but many rose to the challenge. The British microbrewer was largely producing “real ale,” a term coined by the nascent Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) to describe cask-conditioned ale, Britain’s national drink. As large brewers sought to phase out this delicious but inconvenient form of beer, CAMRA and microbrewers fought to bring it roaring back to life. See campaign for real ale (camra) and cask conditioning.

The idea of the microbrewery had a particular appeal in the United States, which in the mid-1970s produced virtually nothing but golden mass market lager. Prohibition, which had brought American brewing to a halt between 1920 and 1933, crushed all the small breweries in the country and few of them ever recovered. The beer monoculture struck many people as stultifying, especially if they had been to the UK or Europe, and some of them decided that America deserved more than one kind of beer. Fritz Maytag, heir to the Maytag washing machine fortune, was first into the fray in 1965. He purchased the old Anchor Brewing Company, a brewery that was founded in the 1800s and had somehow recovered after Prohibition, but had limped into the latter half of the 20th century. The local popularity of his snappy, amber-colored, aromatic Anchor Steam Beer showed others that flavorful beer could be sold in America too. John “Jack” McAuliffe followed with New Albion brewing in Sonoma, California, in 1976, and in 1980 Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi fired the kettle at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. President Jimmy Carter signed a bill making homebrewing legal as of February 1, 1979, an act that galvanized legions of future microbrewers. See carter, james earl, jr, and homebrewing. The revolution was on. Eventually the West Coast of the United States and Canada became dotted with small companies manufacturing purpose-built equipment for the burgeoning American microbrewing industry.

The beer, too, was revolutionary. Most microbreweries sought to produce the exact opposite of what the big mass market breweries were making. Instead of pale yellow bland lagers, they brewed bold chocolaty stouts, snappy bitter India pale ales, and caramel-accented amber ales. Few of them brewed lagers—because cold fermentation is difficult in the home, most of these former homebrewers came to commercial brewing with little knowledge of lager brewing. In the meantime, there was a whole world of ales to brew, and Michael Jackson’s seminal 1977 book The World Guide to Beer held the keys to that world, lovingly describing great brewing traditions from his native England and well beyond. See jackson, michael.

The microbrewing revolution has spawned over 1,600 breweries in the United States and about 600 in the UK, but it has also inspired craft brewing movements worldwide. From Japan to Finland to Brazil and even wine-rich Italy, the spirit of entrepreneurship and creativity that typifies the microbrewer has accelerated with a pace that has astonished even the brewers themselves. Most of these once “micro” breweries have grown, and many are not so tiny anymore, even if they are still vanishingly small when compared with the international giants of brewing. The term “microbrewery” eventually became awkward; what do you call a brewery that once brewed for just the local community, but now sends the same beer into markets throughout the country? The term “craft brewery” has therefore come to replace “microbrewery”—it describes a brewery that is still small by international standards, but makes full-flavored beers from largely traditional ingredients using traditional methods. Although the term is fading from use, the Brewers Association in the United States continues to define a microbrewery as a brewery producing less than 17,600 hl (15,000 US barrels) per year.

As the term “microbrewery” fades, however, there is a new player taking the stage—the “nanobrewery.” No one has yet set out a clear definition for a nanobrewery, but most are truly tiny commercial operations brewing and selling beer in batches as small as 10–15 US gallons. As of 2011, there were probably only 50 or so nanobreweries in the United States, but many more in the planning stages. As small as nanobreweries may be, they have already caught the attention of American tax authorities, who are quick to remind them that they are not too small to pay federal excise taxes.