The commercialisation of craft

Craft spirits, so-called and authentic, are now ubiquitous. Hamish Smith discusses what this means for the term –  and what the term actually means

We live in a time when the augmented form has become the norm. When the cheapest fuel at the petrol station is premium and when you can’t find a boozer that isn’t a gastro-pub. The same is true of the spirits industry, where ‘handcrafted’ (and all its derivatives) has become perfectly ordinary.

Just as ‘deluxe’ is old fashioned and bling super-premiums now seem passé, craft descriptors – at least if they continue to be commercialised to within an inch of their definitions – will one day soon have their day.

Craft spirits started with worthy intentions. Legitimately small-scale businesses (let’s just say those that count in bottles not 9-litre cases) distilling spirits themselves. Handcrafted was not factory-automated, it was approximate rather than consistent, and sometimes it wasn’t very good. But it was, nonetheless, what the average person might reasonably expect from the description. 

In the slipstream of craft beer, craft spirits had a ready market. Consumers understood the pitch (‘support the local little guys; it’s about passion not profits’) – indeed it became a lifestyle choice, a badge of discerning consuming. With craft beer’s rise in the US acting as semaphore, big business couldn’t ignore the signals. Marketing departments likely clasped for the dictionary – as we all have – and thought: “Our business makes things with skill.” 

Indeed, many big brands’ distilling knowhow goes back centuries – their execution of distillation precise and consistent. But handcrafted? Well, control panels need hands. Justifying the small-scale connotation of craft is slightly more tricky. A million-plus case brand can’t disguise its size. Cue small-batch limited editions – but from the same mega-distillery that created the millions of cases of standard spirit (or should that be premium?). 

Did you know about ‘the craft of Bacardi and the ‘craftsmanship’ of Bombay Sapphire? That Absolut vodka is “crafted with Swedish winter wheat”? Well it’s just a Google search away. None claim to be craft spirits per se, but the inference is there. In the US, Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark recently won lawsuits in which it was alleged the marketing of their whiskies as handcrafted and handmade respectively is misleading. And Tito’s Handmade Vodka has faced ever-rumbling litigation, with courts discussing the type of still and its mechanisation as indicators of handmade. Tito’s has so far been successful in court but ‘small-batch’ has now been examined in the latest round of federal hearings. 

In the US there are also guidelines as to craft. According to the American Distilling Institute ‘certified craft spirits’ are “products of an independently-owned distillery with maximum annual sales of 52,000 cases where the product is physically distilled and bottled on-site”. The ADI adds that no more than 25% of the company can be owned by a party who is not the distiller and, to further paraphrase, there must be “hands-on production” and the label must say who it is distilled by.

Where does this all leave us? The US has firmer guidelines than most of the world as to the marketing of craft products but they are open to interpretation – even the US federal courts find it hard to define and rule on these descriptions. In Europe craft has no legal definition, so let’s talk to some distillers in the UK about what it means to them.

CRAFT OR NOT CRAFT?

Brewdog – which has been vocal on its interpretation of craft beer – is preparing to enter the spirits market under its new distillery, Lone Wolf. So let’s see what distiller Steven Kersley thinks as a starting point. He says to put craft on a label the operation has to be focused on quality, innovation (which is normally limited by corporate ownership), and transparency, which is where he sees an opportunity for abuse. 

“A lot of small distillers are not transparent around their raw material,” he says. “We will be truly grain to glass as we’ll make our own vodka which will be then used as the base for each of our gins. Most distillers we identify with being craft procure their vodka from industry suppliers, such as Hayman or Thames distillers. This is understandable as the vodka distillation equipment is a huge investment. 

“Some of the distilleries which do buy in spirit are making fantastic gins; but the dubiety for me is, has the liquid been crafted or has it been flavoured? For me a bit of both. The gins can be great, but the distillery hasn’t made the spirit. They’ve never seen the grain or the yeast it was created from.” 

Rémy Cointreau’s Botanist is a good example of a craft brand that doesn’t make its gin from scratch. Conceived by whisky man Jim McEwan and “handcrafted” at Bruichladdich Distillery, the brand says its Lomond still has been adjusted specifically for its gin, and that 22 of the 31 botanicals are “hand-foraged” from the island. The spirit is bought in – as is the case with most UK gins – but blended with local water and that production, which seems technically involved, is overseen by “craftsmen”. 

So does that fit with the consumer interpretation of craft? Certainly there is evidence of skill. Darren Rook, of the London Distillery Company, is another who buys spirit in, for his Dodd’s gin. He likens gin production – in Europe anyway – to “alchemy” rather than distillation, as by law you have to start with a neutral spirit. A few operations have invested in the columns that produce neutral spirit from scratch – Chase Distillery and Adnam’s Southwold Distillery spring to mind – but most so-called craft producers are rectifying already produced spirit.  

“It’s a throwback from the quality control of gin in the old days that insured people didn’t die of methanol poisoning,” says Rook. “Neutral grain spirit used to be a selling point – that you were using a clean neutral spirit. As bigger companies got bigger they lobbied in Europe to make sure this is the way it is made. In America there are brands creating their own base spirit for gin because there you only have to go up to 86% abv on the still.  So we could make gin here from our pot still base and sell it to America.”

Vodka, though, is different. Kersley picks up the point: “What I really disagree with is craft vodka. It can be vodka purchased at a cost of £1 a litre approximately, diluted, redistilled, diluted again and bottled. I think that’s an abuse of the craft definition, as there’s very little the distillery is doing in terms of crafting the spirit.” Rook agrees: “Rectifying just polishes out flavour. They don’t do enough to justify £30-£35 a bottle. We won’t make vodka until we buy the equipment to make it [from scratch].”

THE AFTERMATH OF CRAFT

Because craft is open to interpretation in production terms, some spirits companies have avoided it altogether. The 86 Company from the US was an early adopter of plain English. Targeted at bartenders this could be the future for the packaging and marketing of spirits.

“The 86 Co is doing its best to avoid misleading or meaningless marketing terms to sell our spirits and by providing as much useful and honest information as possible,” says company co-founder Simon Ford. “Before we’d even made our first spirit we wanted to create a culture of transparency, create labels with information a professional bartender would want to know and we wanted to cut out the marketing jargon. 

“I couldn’t find any reason to use terms such as craft, artisanal, small-batch, handmade or some of the older and fancier terms such as ‘deluxe’ and ‘prestige’, because they don’t have common, defined meanings that everyone fully understands. All those terms paint nice pictures for the consumer so I understand why marketers use them, but I want to use the brief moments we get to communicate about our products to educate people.”

HOW BIG CAN BE SMALL

The market for craft exists, so how do big companies get in on a trend that their global brands can’t easily satisfy? Diageo and Pernod Ricard have clearly thought this through. 

Pernod Ricard has collaborated with entrepreneur Åsa Caap with the brand Our/Vodka. Caap’s idea was to develop a local vodka brand, using local ingredients and involving local entrepreneurs. She was working with Absolut when she made the observation: “Everything was about local. I had to put it to one side – it was not something for Absolut. But I started to think of a global brand truly relevant to local senses. You cannot cheat on local”. 

Meanwhile Diageo was busy with its own strategy. It launched Distil Ventures in 2013 – a semi-autonomous arm that invests in start-up spirits businesses, helping them with costs along the way but pre-agreeing a buy-out option at a pre-agreed time. Frank Lampen, the chief tasting officer, says the strategy has two struts: to target specific areas of the spirits business “that will develop over the next five-10 years” and to be a “low-cost and low-risk way of placing a side bet in areas Diageo might not be in”.  

At the heart of this operation is the appreciation that a spirit brand’s independence is key to the consumer appeal, so Diageo’s shareholdings remain a minority, up until it might decide to buy the company out – which is no given. With investment projects now into double figures, it is paradoxically a targeted yet scatter-gun approach. There are two ways to look at this.

The anti-big business argument might venture that Diageo is using its wealth and might to cherry pick successful small businesses, buying them out at what could be a lower than market rate. The counter would be that Diageo takes on the risk and cost of supporting these businesses, and so long as they remain automatous and insulated from corporate targets, their investment and expertise act as a vital leg-up in the most difficult phase of a business’s growth.

So Diageo is very much invested in craft. But Lampen doesn’t like the term. His personal view is that craft is meaningless as a descriptor and that he has tried to unpick exactly what it means. He concludes that what people connect with is “maker-led companies”, which is what Distil Ventures is there to support. 

FUTURE GAZING

So what does the future hold? Craft descriptors will likely continue to spread, and become less meaningful to the consumer as they do. One man who can future gaze is Kevin Shaw, founder of Stranger & Stranger, the international design agency that designs packaging before it enters the market. He says continued misuse of these terms will “devalue artisanal terminology to such an extent that the growing cynicism will likely scar the authentic for some time”.  

When authentic craft distillers are forced to forsake their own terminology, the copycats will have nothing to copy – until of course the next buzzwords are born. But buzzwords are fatalistic by nature. Like drone bees, they buzz, reproduce and die shortly after. But this time there is a sense they have been taken by the companies that need them least, from the companies that need them most.