It’s not going to be easy picking which brews we do in the Kasper Shultz (our new small batch pilot brewery where we can experiment and play with new recipes) but there is no doubt that it will be a lot of fun.

I’m very excited that we are getting back to our roots and having a way to be more expressive and experimental with our craft (*ahem* brewing). After all, we are a craft brewer so it’s due time that we got back to having this kind of fun.

Of course I am bracing for the conversations that are about to come - everyone has an opinion on what we should brew up next. When I start talking to others about this new opportunity I get a lot of questions on how big we are and how we can still consider ourselves a craft brewery when we brew the volumes that we do.

Some drinkers are fanatical in their understanding of what defines a craft brewer. Some feel it can only be a small independent "mom and pop" sized brewery. They feel that once you are a bit bigger you lose the right to be a craft brewer. This is not fair and more importantly, I believe, not accurate. Others feel it has to do with the ingredients that you use and that it must be all malt ingredients. This is an interesting perspective, but I find it limiting.

I personally think to be a "craft brewer" you have to be “crafty” at brewing. I do believe it has a lot to do with the ingredients, but it’s more about how you find and use those natural ingredients.

In my mind the craftiest of all the brewers were those that first started brewing, they used what was growing naturally nearby; it was familiar to them and often only seasonally available. If you lived in a part of the world where spices were part of your regular diet then spices would sooner or later end up in your beer (coriander, ginger and so on), the same can be said for rice, herbs, chocolate, fruit, wheat etc. Heck, you can even say that brewing is close to the same as cooking up a pot of stew. Find the ingredients; put them together using your training and natural gut instinct and see what comes from the experiment.

As far as the size of the brewery goes, the more people you need to feed, the bigger the pot of stew you need make....it’s still the same tasty home cooked stew.