When I first began working in the beer industry, the words “craft beer” were used as a shorthand to describe any beer that wasn’t cask or a more well-understood style or brand, such as lager or Guinness. (A caveat here: in Lancashire, where I live, “normal” beer has always been cask. When I worked in a local pub, calling something craft beer was a useful, if not mostly meaningless, way to explain to a customer that what they were getting wasn’t a pint of bitter.)

Over time, people came to understand that craft beer usually referred to one of those new American-style beers, full of hops and probably hazy. People were suspicious at first. Then they grew to love it, coming in each week to try new beers by breweries with unusual names, excited to taste the latest inventions in hops and malt.

Craft beer quickly became big business, which was a difficult hypocrisy to settle for many of its fans. This alternative style of beer was marketed as underground, as “punk”, and sold to drinkers as independent, fresh, exciting, and nothing to do with the big corporate beer conglomerates that ruled the pubs and taps up and down the country.

In the US, craft beer had created a whole universe of beer drinkers who wanted to care about the quality of their beer and the artisanal way in which it was made – by skilled professionals, in small batches, often in their own brew pubs. There was nothing mass-produced about the original scene. The point was to have beer that was as individual as its brewery, a complete departure from the homogeneity of Big Beer, where a pint was the same no matter where you drank it, when........

© The Guardian