The History of the Craft Beer Movement: From Homebrew to Empire
TC
Tom Callahan
6 min read
The history of the craft beer movement in America begins with a law change most people have never heard of. In 1978, President Carter signed legislation legalising homebrewing at the federal level for the first time since Prohibition. What followed over the next four decades was the most significant transformation in American drinking culture since repeal. The craft beer movement went from a handful of obsessed homebrewers to a $26 billion industry in a single generation. Here is how it happened, and the bars where you can still taste the different eras.
The Homebrew Years: 1978 to 1994
The 1978 legalisation did not instantly produce a craft beer industry. What it produced was a generation of homebrewers who discovered that American lager, which was what virtually every commercial brewery was producing at the time, did not need to be the only option. Fritz Maytag had already bought and saved Anchor Brewing in San Francisco in 1965 and was making genuinely flavourful beer in a market that had largely forgotten the concept. But Anchor was an anomaly. The homebrew revolution was the education that created the market.
Sierra Nevada Brewing Company opened in Chico, California in 1980. Ken Grossman built it on equipment he largely made himself and with a commitment to hoppy, flavourful ales that had not been commercially available in America for decades. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, released in 1981, is arguably the most influential single beer in American history. It established the template for what an American craft beer could be: hop-forward, full-flavoured, and made with genuine conviction.
01
Anchor Steam Bar
SoMa, San Francisco$$Historic / Essential
This bar attached to Anchor's original SoMa brewing site is where the modern American craft beer movement can be traced to its roots. Fritz Maytag's decision to save Anchor in 1965 predates the homebrew era and makes it the oldest surviving craft brewery in America. Their Steam Beer is not a nostalgia piece — it is still one of the most interesting hybrid styles in production, and drinking it here, where it has been made for nearly sixty years, has a weight to it that most beer experiences do not.
Order: Anchor Steam on draft — the original and still the most revealing version
02
Russian River Brewing Company
Downtown Santa Rosa, California$$$Pilgrimage / Always Queues
Vinnie Cilurzo is credited with inventing the Double IPA when he brewed Blind Pig IPA in 1994. Russian River Brewing is where he has spent most of his career since, and where Pliny the Elder — the DIPA that turned the category into a serious discussion — is poured fresh. The queue outside on most days is real and worth accepting. Drinking Pliny at the source is a craft beer rite of passage that has not been diminished by the beer's wider availability.
Order: Pliny the Elder on draft — the freshest possible version of an iconic beer
The complete craft beer bar guideOver 400 craft beer bars reviewed across 60 cities — the full history is on tap.
By the mid-1990s, the craft beer movement had enough momentum to produce a wave of brewpubs — restaurants with brewing operations attached — that brought fresh local beer to parts of the country that had never had it. This period also produced the first serious arguments about what craft beer was supposed to be: was it about flavour? Locality? Independence? Size? The Brewers Association eventually settled on a definition, but the debates from this period shaped the movement's values in ways that are still visible today.
Portland, Oregon emerged as the second capital of American craft beer during this period. By 2000, Portland had more breweries per capita than any city in the world, and the culture around those breweries was genuinely different from anywhere else — more communal, less precious, more interested in session strength and variety than in prestige.
03
Horse Brass Pub
Belmont, Portland$Worn In / Essential
Don Younger opened Horse Brass in 1976 and spent the next three decades making it the central institution of Portland's beer culture. He championed local breweries before that was a viable category, stocked British real ales when the concept was essentially unknown in the Pacific Northwest, and made the Belmont Street pub a meeting place for the brewers who would define Oregon craft beer. The pub looks almost exactly as it did in 1980. This is by design and is the right call.
Order: Whatever Pacific Northwest IPA is freshest on cask or keg
04
Blind Tiger Ale House
Hell's Kitchen, New York$$First Wave / Comprehensive
Blind Tiger opened in 1995 and was one of the first bars in New York to treat craft beer as a serious category — long tap lists, rotated frequently, with staff who actually knew what was on them. The bar's two decades of curation mean its current tap list reflects the full arc of the craft beer movement: session IPAs, hazy NEIPAs, sours, stouts, and occasionally something from a small New England brewery that most New Yorkers will not find anywhere else in the city.
Order: Ask what is freshest from a New England or Pacific Northwest brewery
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The Global Spread: 2010 to the Present
By 2010, the American craft beer model had crossed the Atlantic and was influencing British, Scandinavian, and eventually continental European brewing in ways that the traditionalists in those countries found alarming. London's BrewDog bar opened in 2010 and was immediately controversial — the beer was too hoppy, too American, too willing to provoke. It was also genuinely good, which made the criticism harder to sustain. BrewDog is now a global brand, and the bar culture it helped create in Britain is one of the most interesting in the world.
05
The Craft Beer Co.
Clerkenwell, London$$Comprehensive / Multi-site
The Craft Beer Co. opened its first London site in 2011 and was one of the handful of bars that established the expectation of a serious tap list as a normal feature of a good London pub. The Clerkenwell original still has forty-plus taps, a cask selection that takes real ale seriously alongside the keg craft, and staff who understand both traditions. This is the bar that represents the moment British pub culture and the American craft beer model found a workable equilibrium.
Order: One cask British real ale and one American-style IPA — the comparison is instructive
06
Mikkeller Bar Copenhagen
Viktoriagade, Copenhagen$$$Global / Original Location
Mikkel Borg Bjergso started Mikkeller as a gypsy brewery with no fixed brewing location, contracting production from other breweries while focusing entirely on recipe development. The concept was anarchic in the context of traditional brewing culture and produced some of the most interesting beers of the 2010s. The Copenhagen original is the bar where you drink Mikkeller in its home city — a clean, considered space with a rotating tap list that demonstrates how the global craft beer movement absorbed every influence and produced something genuinely new.
Order: The current seasonal — Mikkeller changes their programme more frequently than almost anyone
New York craft beer barsOur guide to the best craft beer bars in New York, from the original first-wave pioneers to the current taprooms.
The history of the craft beer movement is the history of what happens when people care enough about a thing to do it properly in defiance of what the market says is acceptable. Fritz Maytag, Ken Grossman, and the homebrewers who preceded them were not operating in a favourable environment. They made their beer anyway, and the industry that followed was built on the same combination of stubbornness and genuine craft.
The best craft beer bars today are still built on that foundation. The equipment is better and the distribution is global, but the bars worth going to are the ones where someone is still making decisions based on what the beer should taste like, not what it should sell for. Every bar in this guide is one of those places.
Craft beer styles explainedFrom the homebrew era to today: a guide to every craft beer style that the movement produced.
