Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

The Craft Beer Revolution: How a Band of Microbrewers Is Transforming the World's Favorite Drink

Rate this book
Over the past 40 years, the craft beer segment has exploded. In 1980, a handful of "microbrewery" pioneers launched a revolution that would challenge the dominance of the national brands, Budweiser, Coors, and Miller, and change the way Americans think about, and drink, beer. Today, there are more than 2700 craft breweries in the United States, with another 1,500 in the works. Their influence is spreading to Europe's great brewing nations, and to countries all over the globe. In The Craft Beer Revolution , Steve Hindy, co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery, tells the inside story of how a band of homebrewers and microbrewers came together in one of America's great entrepreneurial triumphs. Citing hundreds of creative businesses like Samuel Adams, Deschutes Brewery, New Belgium, Dogfish Head, and Harpoon, he shows how their combined efforts have grabbed 10 percent of the US beer market―and how Budweiser, Miller, and Coors, all now owned by international conglomerates, are creating their own craft-style beers, the same way major food companies have acquired or created smaller organic labels to court credibility with a new generation of discerning eaters and drinkers. This is a timely and fascinating look at what America's new generation of entrepreneurs can learn from the intrepid pioneering brewers who are transforming the way Americans enjoy this wonderful, inexpensive, storied beer.

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 22, 2014

16 people are currently reading
744 people want to read

About the author

Steve Hindy

13 books1 follower

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
51 (19%)
4 stars
107 (41%)
3 stars
80 (31%)
2 stars
16 (6%)
1 star
2 (<1%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 50 reviews
Profile Image for Rand.
481 reviews116 followers
Read
August 12, 2015
I won this book in a giveaway on this website and it arrived shortly after I decided to stop drinking beer.

I still decided to (pretend to) read this book, because I am a man of my word. It was okay, nothing to write home about. Essentially it's the book-form of an infomercial; nothing one can't glean from hanging around at opening hours of a quality pub and pestering the owner/bartender while he's busy checking in orders.

My brother-in-law said it was a decent thing to flip through while he was on the toilet but I don't trust him because he drinks shit beer.
575 reviews14 followers
April 4, 2014
Read my full review here: http://mimi-cyberlibrarian.blogspot.c...

I chuckled when the publisher sent me a copy of The Craft Beer Revolution because of all my family, I know the least about beer, and frankly, have just developed a bit of a taste for beer in my old age!

Stephen Hindy is the owner of Brooklyn Brewery, and The Craft Beer Revolution tells the story of how he and a group of other brewers have transformed the beer industry. Craft beers are now being made all over the country. Even the major companies are now making craft brews as well as their traditional mass-marketed beers.

The book is well written and well documented. It would be an awesome Father's Day present for your favorite beer connoisseur
.
My major disappointment was that he didn't tell the story of Larry Bell, our local brewer, who began the craft brew movement in Michigan and the Midwest with Bell's Beer. Quite honestly, the biggest event of the year in Kalamazoo happens in March when Bell's releases their Oberon Beer. It's a huge downtown party! We have another big brewing company building a complex in downtown Kalamazoo--Arcadia Ales, which is headquartered in Battle Creek Michigan.

I gave my copy of The Craft Beer Revolution to my niece's husband who is the brew master at the Livery, a brew pub in Benton Harbor Michigan. He will put it to much better use than I can, novice that I am. If you are interested in Michigan Beer, here is an article by John Gonzales and his search for the best Michigan brewery.


Cheers!

Breweries mentioned:
Bell's Brewery. http://bellsbeer.com/
Arcadia Ales. http://www.arcadiaales.com/
The Livery. http://liverybrew.com/
Profile Image for John Brumbaugh.
95 reviews
May 10, 2014
The book was really good at the beginning when it was talking about the origin stories of the various craft breweries and brewpubs in the country. About halfway through the book, it started to get into the politics of craft brewing and the different trade associations and how things were going and it got way too wonky for me.

To me, the one string that ran throughout the entire story was Hindy's complete and utter dislike of Jim Koch from Boston Beer Company (Sam Adams). He consistently seemed to try to point out that Koch wasn't a true craft brewer and that the money he has spent marketing his beers isn't something that real craft brewers do or should do; it is something Miller, Coors, and AB do. To me, Hindy came across as petty and jealous of Koch's and Boston Beer Company's success.
Profile Image for Rayfes Mondal.
446 reviews7 followers
January 5, 2015
Great history of the craft beer movement in this country. I'm happy we have some many choices now.
Profile Image for Joshua.
67 reviews
May 27, 2018
This was a fantastic look at the last couple of decades and the emergence of the craft beer movement. I really appreciated how the author segmented his narrative and went out of his way to be as impartial as possible when describing both his shortcomings and conflicts. What impressed me most is the level of comradery and dedication these pioneers and innovators for such a remarkable beverage. I docked 1 star because towards the end it got a little bogged down with politics and publications. Above all, it made me want to crack a cold one.
Profile Image for Tim.
148 reviews
January 13, 2019
It's a fascinating time for craft beer, and I appreciate learning about the history of the "revolution." That said, I enjoyed the first half of The Craft Beer Revolution more than the second (other than the "third generation" chapter at the end). The little vignettes on brewers and breweries from the mid-20th-century onward were most interesting to me. It got a little technical with talk of competing associations, distribution games/politics, etc. Overall, I thought the book provided a nice snapshot of craft beer's past, present, and future.
Profile Image for Andrew.
65 reviews4 followers
February 15, 2018
An introspective look at the craft beer industry as told by one of it's early pioneers and perenial heavyweights. More or less a primary source as told by Hindy of the various evolutions and generations of the craft beer industry. This is a history that is still being written, but Hindy covers craft beer as he sees/saw it until 2012. While many things have changed, this book gives a well rounded context to how the industry has evolved to today.
Profile Image for Erin Shields.
13 reviews2 followers
February 24, 2020
I feel this book tried to be waaaay too much for it's slender size (228 pgs). It's part history of craft brewing, part legislative history of all beer, part struggle between big breweries AND brief histories of several small breweries. Way too many names for my preference; often times 4-5 names are referenced on one page, and then several pages later, there's a last name reference. A book can be a 'nonfiction story's, this just didn't hit that mark.
Profile Image for Michael J..
Author 1 book2 followers
March 12, 2021
Hindy brings a front-line eye to the craft beer revolution—Hindy was a war correspondent before he opened Brooklyn Brewery—and his writing style has a refreshing edge to it, particularly when he gets into the machinations of the Great American Beer Festival's Consumer Preference Poll and Jim Koch's hunt for votes. Hindy is the kind of guy you'd love to get a beer with, maybe even four or five—whatever it takes to get the really juicy stories.
14 reviews
February 8, 2019
A great inside look on the history of the craft beer business. As someone in it for nearly a decade, I got a ton of info on stuff I only knew of through vague references and stories from longtime veterans.
Profile Image for Rune Schlosser.
82 reviews10 followers
April 10, 2020
Ok indføring i den amerikanske craft revolution. Lige en kende for detaljeret omkring personerne involveret, så den kunne måske have været kortet en smule ned. Dog interessant læsning lige gyldigt hvad.
18 reviews
January 22, 2021
A great summary of the US Craft Beer revolution as of 2014. A lot has happened since then however if you're interested how everything started in 1965 by Mr Maytag and how the big US Craft Beer brands came to be, this is your book.
Profile Image for CJ.
83 reviews1 follower
March 29, 2018
Good read. Crazy to think how much has changed since publication. Would like more on InBev and the inroads they are making with their acquisitions but guess wasn't as much as a thing at the time.
Profile Image for Samuel.
123 reviews3 followers
Read
July 25, 2022
I don't rate craft beer books out of principle, but man alive, there were times when my fingers were fidgeting to give this book a 1 star rating. In spite of Hindy's background as a journalist and this book having 3 editors, this book was remarkably difficult to read in places.

The Craft Beer Revolution suffers from a flaw many books of this sort seem to have: it hasn't identified its target audience. Is this book intended for neophytes or industry-savvy folk? In some places, Hindy discusses industry peers and past events as if the reader is supposed to be at least marginally aware of how the craft beer scene in the US has evolved over times. And then he has moments where he degenerates into borderline facetiousness. He doesn't explain stuff like Oktoberfest being a beer style as well as a festival, or what Brettanomyces does in a beer, or what the three tier system actually is, but he takes a moment to explain what wort is, or what ABV stands for. Surely anyone reading this book would know that already?

And there are other confusing sections, such as Russian River inventing the first Double IPA, then several pages later, Dogfish Head take the credit for inventing the first Imperial IPA - this is particularly confusing because DIPA and Imperial IPA are considered the same thing in this day and age, but Hindy doesn't take a moment to clarify this anywhere. He does take a moment to talk about silly, irrelevant nonsense, such as his two week vacation to Scotland that Vijay Mallya sponsored - to what end?

My other gripe is the fact that Hindy is remarkably prone to digressions, and as a result, the timeline of the unfolding revolution is awfully out of place. I don't understand why he's going for a chronological order of events, but then fails to mention the year in which Stone Brewing became operational, or the year in which BA adopted the small, independent, traditional format for defining what a craft brewer is. Why fail to keep the timeline for such important events, but shower the reader in irrelevant details such as this or that distributor's genealogies, who they married, and who Hindy went golfing with?

In a way, it does read like a series of recollections about Hindy and his super awesome buddies, or people who had some beef with him, such as the notorious Jim Koch. And speaking of Koch's in general, why not take a moment to explain that Jim Koch of Boston Brewing and Greg Koch of Stone Brewing are not related? It's a pretty important distinction to make. Unless, of course, the book operates on the assumption that the reader knows enough about brewing and the industry to know this already - but then, why even explain what IBU or bottle conditioning are?

The book is not a complete waste of time, and it's clear that Hindy was a prominent figure in the revolution, and that a lot of research went into this book. But it could have been written better.
233 reviews4 followers
August 6, 2014
THE CRAFT BEER REVOLUTION by Steve Hindy is a must read for anyone who wants to know more about good beer. The big brewery beer is fine if you are passing out suds to people you don’t care about, but it is in the artisanal beer, the beer crafted from the best ingredients and with the special care one takes with their child that you will find the superior taste and quality that you would reserve for only the best of friends.
In this book Hindy, a one-time foreign correspondent and now president of the 16th largest brewing company in America, sets out the history of this revolution in beer. It has been a long slog for those who wanted something more from a beer than just a long lasting head and a sameness that was all but boring. Here he starts with the pioneers of 1965 and progresses through the slow spread of home brewing, on into the fights against the big brewing companies and further on to the fights among the crafters themselves (Sam Adams anyone?).
Along the way there is a reverence given to the locavors of the world, those who wanted their brew not to be a blah and bland bubbling beer but one that reflects the local nature of the product they were producing, something to symbolize the hometown of the beer.
In Germany, every town I went to had national brands available, but they also presented the town beer, different, localized and very often more to my liking than the big, internationally known products. With this book Hindy is calling our nation to arms against the blandness of the big corporations and to rally around the local brews. This history is a must read for every craft brewer out there, whether you are producing 150,000 barrels a year or just enough for you and your friends to enjoy over the weekend.
This book has given me greater insight into the realm of the small brewer and I am very happy to have won this through Goodreads.
673 reviews10 followers
September 4, 2016
I received The Craft Beer Revolution as part of a Goodreads giveaway.

Here, Hindy, a pioneer of the craft beer movement, gives us a broad history, beginning with the industry's beginnings in the 1960s through the microbrewery explosion of the 21st century.

It's a very readable book, and Hindy, who was actively involved in the movement from its early days, is able to give a real insider's view. There's a lot of insight into conferences and other meetings that made the industry what it is today, and the market share they boast (about 10%) is a really fantastic story to tell. As a big fan of craft brewing, I enjoyed his insights. The narration is also very engaging and readable.

However, there are some faults. The book is almost exclusively focused on the coasts (with some dabbling in Colorado), largely ignoring the Midwest. Yes, it's home to the "big brewers" like Budweiser and Miller, but it also boasts a wealth of craft brewers. Also, while it's not as bad as I might have expected, there is a certain element of snobbishness/elitism at work. Do I prefer micro/craft brews to Budweiser? Yes. Do other people disagree? Yes. And that's fine. Both are available; drink what you want, and stop with the superiority thing.

So, a fun read, but with some caveats.
Profile Image for Marks54.
1,568 reviews1,227 followers
June 20, 2014
Steve Hindy's book is a history of the American craft beer business from the mid-1960s until the present. It is interesting and informative and does a good job at raising the issues that brewers faced in struggling for legitimacy and success - and personal fulfillment from pursuing a business like this. Hindy is also clear on the economics of the business and the various political and institutional issues faced by these small idiosyncratic local businesses competing across a wide range of local markets. The account in the book is generally chronological and descriptive -- largely the facts and the backstories behind your favorite local beers. I found the book enormously helpful and will likely refer to it the next time I go to a bar or restaurant and presented with a beer menu and know few if any of the products listed. One can always ask for more analysis, such as on pricing points, niche structures, the behaviors of the major breweries, consolidation trends, etc., but just knowing some of the basic facts and stories about these beers is a very good start.
Profile Image for JC.
1,725 reviews59 followers
May 4, 2014
Received this book via a giveaway.

Read this book as a non beer drinker and so had no background on craft beers or any beer companies for that reason really. I went into this book to learn a little bit more about all of the local breweries that seem to be popping up around and this book delivers on that front - lots of information as to why people are enjoying craft beers more and more and how the business doesn't seem to be slowing down.

One thing that I took away from this is all of the restrictions that seemed to be placed on craft brewers have really made them work hard to get their beers out there. They've overcome a lot and have made getting a fresh brewed beer much easier for all interested.

If you're into craft brews or beer in general, then you should check this book out. And if you're like me and don't drink, this book is still a well-written and eye-opening look into how we've gotten to where things are in the craft brew industry.
Profile Image for Todd.
51 reviews1 follower
June 5, 2014
This book provides the history of craft brewing in the U.S. The discussions of the founders are interesting as they were leaders to a better (beer) world. He also provides discussion of the uphill struggles, be it against the big 2, distributors, protectionist state laws, misguided state laws and the impact that the prohibition mistake is still having today.

At times, the author was almost too even keeled. I was expecting the chapter where there was a call to arms over some of the dated laws which tend to not favor the small brewer but in all he seemed to maintain a respectful voice to the point of it not being entirely clear which side of a couple issues he took.

I will advise you of this. If you are reading this book, you must like good beer and as you read, that is all you will be thinking about. My suggestion is to buy a couple of fine brews prior to cracking the book and avoid running out to the store like I had to do.
Profile Image for Tony Parsons.
4,156 reviews102 followers
June 29, 2015
I can even begin to tell you how much I love Microbreweries.

Unfortunately I cannot drink anymore. 2 of my 3 kids love it now though. I taught them to appreciate good beer.

Peroni, Grolsch, Guinness Stout, Corona...

A very awesome book cover, pictures, statistics, politics & great font & writing style. A very well informative book on the art of Beer making. It was very easy for me to read & follow along from start/finish & never a dull moment. There were no spoken grammar errors, or any repetitive or out of line sequence sentences. Lots of exciting scenarios, with several twists/turns & a great set of unique characters to keep track of. This could also make another great informative historical Beer movie, Sociology or Drug/Alcohol class PP presentation, or mini TV series (A & E, History channel). There is no doubt in my mind this is a very easy rating of 5 stars.
Thank you for the free Goodreads; Palgrave Macmillan paperback book
Tony Parsons MSW (Washburn)
313 reviews
June 9, 2014
Full disclosures: 1)I received this as a Goodreads giveaway.
2) My tastebuds are thankful for the craft beer revolution, and I wish it had started 20 or 30 years earlier.

This book presented me with more than I wanted to know about the history of the players and their efforts. There’s a lot of detail about a lot of things, and I found myself skimming over quite a bit, including the details of the rivalries among the various organizations set up to help small brewers. There is good detail about the politics/lobbying involved, as the 22nd Amendment left regulation to the states, which seem to be under the sway of monopolistic distributors, often in collusion with the big 3, now 2, beer makers.

So, if you’re more interested in the making, tasting, and drinking of good beer, you might be bored. If you’re interested in the history of these entrepreneurs, you might like it.
Profile Image for Kara.
106 reviews12 followers
July 17, 2014
An in-depth history of craft beer by an author who is a brewer himself. The Craft Beer Revolution is packed full of details about individual brewers, brewpubs and breweries, laws, and organizations that have made the business of craft brewing what it is today. This is not a light and breezy page-turner by any means and I imagine it as more of a textbook for a brewing course than anything else. But I enjoyed the inside look at more brewers/breweries than I will ever remember and have a better appreciation of the david and goliath type struggle craft brewers have endured over the last half century, whether it be up against lobbyists and congress or the huge national breweries.
Profile Image for Tracy Morgan.
38 reviews4 followers
April 18, 2014
First I should, I won this through a Goodreads giveaway. This is incredibly fun book for anyone who enjoys a good glass of beer. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. In fact, I finished it in about two days. I learned everything from how the beer making process works, how to start a successful business, and how a small group of people helped change the way we think of beer. It was a fascinating read and by the time the book was done, I was definitely ready for a delicious beer. A great read for beer snobs of all kinds, and a tale of how a little dream and great ingenuity can lead to amazing things. I highly recommend this book.
Profile Image for Joseph.
9 reviews
May 2, 2015
I found this book somewhat tedious and very focus on beer internal and external politics vs. the craft and artists of beer making. The author also jumps forward and backwards in time making it a little hard to follow. It lacks passion -- i guess that's my biggest disappointment. In contrast, the book about coffee (God in a Cup) which documents the various "waves" of the coffee movement gave me strong visual images of the places, smells and tastes. This book does none of that.
Profile Image for Andrew.
3 reviews
August 24, 2015
Let me start with the boring part, I received this a promotional giveaway...

Now my opinion. There were some parts of this book that might drag a bit unless you're REALLY obsessed with our country's craft beer movement. That being said, this book dives into the movement pretty hardcore and really captures those formative years well. There is a lot of information captured in it and is a great resource for anyone who is interested in the topic!
18 reviews15 followers
Read
April 22, 2014
In compliance with FTC guidelines, I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

The Craft Beer Revolution is "inside baseball" for the independent beer industry. From the early days of Fritz Maytag and Anchor Steam to the current rise of the craft beer movement, this book covers the brands, the people, the events, and the associations.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 50 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.