Groups are hard to keep together. That’s why there are so many movies about the “old gang” getting back together again. It’s why bands break up only to reunite for lucrative tours later on in life.
As breweries grow and as brewing scenes mature, there will be more difficult splits. What a large brewery needs vs. what a small one needs will only widen. What newcomers needs vs. old hands will widen. Priorities begin to lose alignment. And that is the general crux, in my opinion, of the recent split from the Colorado Brewers Guild.
14 craft breweries in Colorado including heavyweights such as New Belgium, Left Hand, Odell’s and Oskar Blues have moved on to form their own trade advocacy organization, Craft Beer Colorado.
Is this bad/good? Will it happen elsewhere?
Let’s tackle that second question because the answer to the first may take a while to develop. I don’t think you will see too many high-profile defections like this. Most guilds are so site specific that major differences can’t truly grow. Plus bigger guilds are comprised of breweries that typically belong to multiple guilds (state and city) which allows an “out” by retiring from the non-working guild to the one that does without need of creating another. Lastly, creating a guild is not easy and requires time. Time that most breweries do not have.
L.A. will probably add guilds simply because certain brewing hotspots will want to band together. I would have thought Torrance (South Bay) may have created one by now but DTLA United beat them to the punch, probably because they have more hurdles to contend with from the city. A common enemy is fertile ground for growth.
That is probably the lesson to be learned from this.