Gypsy Brewing Link

I like Cambridge Brewing but I think this is the wrong attitude:

By making Craft Beer welcoming to all by design, we’ve made it a desirable industry in which people want to play a part. This includes the inevitable number of beer marketing companies, aka contract brewers (a few of whom call themselves “gypsy brewers”), who either feel that there’s money to be made in this fad or who genuinely love craft beer but don’t want to invest the capital in their own brick and mortar breweries. This lack of skin in the game shows me that they value short term gains over long term personal investment and hard work. And I truly believe that there is no such thing as a gypsy brewer.

Luckily cooler heads from Somerville Brewing put it into perspective:

To those of us with a more mature perspective on business, we call this friendly competition. Some of the best advice I’ve received has been from people you might call “competitors”. When the entire segment of craft beer is only approaching 7% of the US beer market, it’s almost absurd to describe other folks in the industry as a threat. Sadly, other brewers internalize the presence of other brands in their local area or the arrival of new brands by people that did not chose the same career lifestyle 20 years ago as an attack on their “brewer” sovereignty.

This is one of the rare spats I’ve read about in the craft brewing market. Most brewers are extremely friendly and generous. Much like independent Mac development, it’s friendliest when the market is tiny and everyone needs a leg up against the common enemy (InBev in the beer market and Microsoft in the software market).