Tony Magee founded Lagunitas Brewing in California in 1993 and has built it into one of the largest craft breweries in the U.S., opening a 300,000-square-foot brewery and taproom in Chicago in 2013. (Lagunitas is also in the process of building a brewery in Azusa, California.) Magee has been in the news quite a bit this year, first for filing suit against Sierra Nevada for trademark infringement over an IPA label—which he immediately dropped in the wake of customer backlash—and then in September for selling a 50 percent stake in Lagunitas to Heineken in order to export his beer internationally. On November 3, the 55-year-old Arlington Heights native will be discussing the politics and business of craft beer with Mark Bazer, host of The Interview Show and WTTW’s My Chicago. Magee spoke over the phone recently about recent events in the beer world, what defines a craft brewery (and whether it should be defined), and what’s next for craft beer.
Every time Anheuser-Busch or Miller-Coors loses a share point, it goes either to craft or to the Modelo brands. The whole of beer in the United States is getting smaller, year by year. People aren’t drinking more beer per capita, they’re drinking a little bit less. That’s been going on for 20 years.
Would Lagunitas still be considered a craft brewery?
So the Brewers Association’s definition of craft beer doesn’t encompass all of craft beer.
If there’s a headline to the state of craft beer, it’s that it could hardly be better. And this is the first time this has happened since the 1870s. There was once a guy named Adolphus Busch who made a beer that later became Budweiser. There was once a guy named Friedrich Miller. There was a guy whose last name was Pabst. And people in the towns where these breweries were could go and meet ’em. Those people are long gone.
