About Us: Authenticating Identity Claims in the Craft Beer Industry

Since its humble beginnings in the late 1970s, the craft beer industry has exploded into an industry with more than 5,000 craft breweries operating in the US alone. Much scholarship has neglected the cultural aspects of the craft beer phenomenon, tending to focus on economic and historical accounts of craft beer and brewing. These approaches remain primarily descriptive and atheoretical, thus overlooking the sociocultural dynamics of craft beer production, consumption, and acculturation. Constructs of craft brewing often define it simply as being craft and in opposition to domestic brewing, which also leads to implicit and explicit assumptions about craft beer as inherently authentic