Monday Rant on a Tuesday: One Big Microcosm

Back in college when I attended one of my first journalism courses, we were taught to be as factually accurate as possible. The professor that taught said course had a fact error policy. A fact error, by his definition was anything close to being factually inaccurate in your news lead or article.

To put it plainly, anyone that took this course quickly became familiar with what a fact error was. That was because if you made one, you got an automatic 60 percent on that assignment. This could include a misspelling of a person's name, mixed digit in an address number, or a wrong time. Almost anything fell into that category.

Bryan from This is Why I'm Drunk had a remarkable post late last week that was well-researched and described some of our beer searching habits over the last few years. I felt moved enough to post a comment, something I really should get to doing more often on sites I enjoy reading. I didn't think that what I said would spark much response, yet would contribute to an entire blog post which is linked in the embedded tweet below.

Whoops. I guess a comment of mine inspired another well-researched post by @BryanDRoth http://t.co/By4SHPmFua #craftbeer #microbrew
— Bill K. (@BurghBeerSnob) August 27, 2013

That is honestly the first time I've hashtagged the term "microbrew" in my entire history of talking beer on Twitter. Bryan admits in the second post that it's pretty much speculation, but that we probably used the term "microbrew" to refer to individual beers and "craft beer" to refer to the actual movement.

It was around the time I took the course that we used "microbrew" to describe different beer made in brewpubs here in Pennsylvania. We did it at Slippery Rock all of the time with North Country brewing Company right on Main Street in town.

Now, here's where my fact error story comes into play. Does it matter what word we choose to describe it anymore? I've actually never given it much thought. Are there brewers that care which term we use? Are there fellow beer geeks that would take it personal if we used one or the other? I'm not entirely sure.

What I'm positively sure about is the lessening of "microbrew" and increasing usage of "craft beer" at the very least can be looked at as a microcosm of what happened when good beer actually went big about a decade ago. That can always be looked at as a good thing.