23 September 2010

Question of the Day

If you're having 600-barrel conditioning tanks built for you in another country........... 

........ do you still qualify as a "microbrewery"?

(For the record, similar tanks by the same company are supposedly at Victory and New Glarus.  I'm not picking on the Delaware folks.)

(Photo courtesy Dogfish Head's website/blog)

2 comments:

Seth said...

Well the definition of Microbrewery is less then 15,000 bbls per year. So I think they still qualify.

Alexander D. Mitchell IV said...

Actually, the "definition" of a "microbrewery" has apparently been in a state of constant flux, as craft beer advocates (including even the Brewers Association) keep "moving the goalposts" and then settled on the distinction between "micro" (under 15K barrels) and "regional" (between 15K and 2 million barrels).

The latest production figures I have for Dogfish Head (end of 2008) indicate a whopping 75,000 barrels annually, with production growth of nearly 400% in the past several years.

So are we saying "15K"? They're five times too big. Have they gotten too big to be thought of in the same terms as Heavy Seas, Troegs, and the like and are now up there with Stone, Yuengling, Anchor, New Belgium, and the other "big boys"? Looks that way.

I visited the original Rehoboth brewoub the first summer it was in operation. I don't recognize the business I stopped in to see last week--the same logo, same attitude, same marketing, same funky beer style........ but wow, did they expand...