The 15 Beers That Defined American Craft Brewing — and Where They Are Now

Before craft beer there was only Big Beer. At first it was factory-made regional lagers that were ubiquitous to a certain area. Old Style in the Midwest, “Natty Boh” in Baltimore, Olympia in the Pacific Northwest, Pearl in Texas — it was what pretty much everyone in these places drank.

By the 1960s, these regional favorites had started to be replaced by national powerhouses and you already know the names. Bud. Miller. Coors. Now these were what literally everybody drank.

Then along came craft beer. Not just lagers but pale ales and IPAs, wheat beers and white ales, stouts and sours and other oddities. Everybody could have their own favorite. And while there are nearly 10,000 craft breweries in the U.S. now, putting out millions of craft beers among them, only a few have truly defined the craft beer industry over the years. While this list is subjective and will surely inspire some debates, there is no argument that each of these beers was groundbreaking in its own way.

In order of release date, here they are.

Anchor Steam Ale

1971

If San Francisco’s Anchor is often credited as America’s first craft brewery — after Fritz Maytag took over the reins in 1965 — then its iconic Steam beer has to be a defining beer to the industry. If you want to pick nits that Steam is in no way a craft beer having been around since the original brewery opened in 1896, that’s fine. But in reimagining the classic beer by improving the “craft” of brewing it with better equipment and processes, Maytag himself defined what it meant to make better beer.

Today: Let’s see: Anchor was sold to Japanese brewer Sapporo in 2017, then shut down operations and filed for bankruptcy in 2023; was acquired by Chobani yogurt billionaire Hamdi Ulukaya in 2024; and, as of today… something maybe is happening? But if you somehow find a can or bottle of Anchor Steam in some store, it is not fresh, to say the least.

New Albion Ale

1976

Credited as the first craft microbrewery to open in the U.S., California’s New Albion Brewing Company was defunct by 1983. Still, brewer/owner Jack McAuliffe has long been immortalized as one of the key players in the craft beer uprising. Inspired by what Anchor Brewing was doing, McAuliffe would open the brewery in Sonoma where an artisan culinary and wine scene was picking up steam. His initial beer, New Albion Ale, sometimes called the country’s first craft beer, was a pale ale made with Cascade hops. Though not unusual today, it would inspire an entire generation of breweries that became a lot more famous than New Albion.

Today: Though the original brewery is still long gone, the beer name was acquired by Boston Beer Company, which, in 2012, would offer the first new bottles of New Albion in 30 years, before returning the trademark to the McAuliffe family.

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

1980

New Albion Ale’s legacy was perhaps most carried on via Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, the first real breakout start of the microbrewing renaissance. Crafted by Ken Grossman, a homebrewing hippie who had visited McAuliffe several times, this little Pale Ale from Chico, Calif., was groundbreaking in its reliance on whole-cone Cascade hops and bottle conditioning. It would put both the brewery and the style of pale ale on the map forevermore. Sierra Nevada Celebration, released in 1981, would further bring a bitter hops intensity into the mainstream, produced from just-picked Cascade, Centennial, and Chinook hops.

Today: Grossman is a billionaire and Sierra Nevada is the 11th-largest brewery in the U.S. (and the second-largest craft brewery) with locations in Chico and Mills River, N.C., just outside Asheville. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale has never changed and remains as good as it ever was.

Yakima Brewing Bert Grant’s IPA

1982

If Maytag, McAuliffe, and Grossman are responsible for California’s craft beer emergence, Grant might deserve credit for the Pacific Northwest’s. After leaving a Yakima hops business to start his own brewpub in 1982 — arguably the first in the nation — his oft-repeated belief was reportedly, “All beers should have more hops.” He earned a modicum of fame in the region for his Scottish Ale — which had nothing to do with Scotland — but it was his third release that would change the game: an India Pale Ale generally credited as the first modern craft beer to actually be labeled an “IPA.” (Ballantine’s more British-style IPA was the only other one on shelves and there’s some newish scholarship that actually dates Anchor’s Liberty Ale in its IPA form to 1983.) Bittered with Galenas hops and then finished with Cascade, the result was a dry, piney, intensely bitter IPA that would create a template for countless other beers to come.

Today: Grant died in 2001 and Yakima Brewing was foreclosed in the early aughts. A few tribute IPAs have been released over the years, and tickers still check in vintage bottles on Untappd that must be pretty gross by now.

Samuel Adams Boston Lager

1984

The first craft beer to become ubiquitous! In 1984, Jim Koch, a man with three Harvard degrees and lineage dating back to immigrant brewers, launched Boston Beer Co. and began selling his Boston Lager door to door. He also made himself surely the first (the only?) craft beer celebrity by putting himself in his own commercials, hyping up his own product often to a shameless degree. But the humble “Sam,” as many drinkers came to call it, was, for many, their first taste of any beer that wasn’t a fizzy yellow macro-lager.

Today: By 1995 Boston Beer Co. was doing well enough to go public. Since then it’s branched out into “alterna-malts” like Twisted Tea and Truly Hard Seltzer, it’s acquired Dogfish Head, and started producing much of its beer in Cincinnati. Some might feel Boston Beer Co. has lost the message, but Boston Lager still perseveres and is still pretty good.

Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stout

1995

At a certain point, beer would start competing with spirits if not trying to become spirituous itself. Sam Adams Triple Bock, a port-like strong ale aged in Jack Daniel’s barrels, was the first to exist, but “BCBS” was the first to mainstream the idea. Originally brewed by Greg Hall for a beer and bourbon event with Jim Beam legend Booker Noe, most drinkers weren’t quite sure how to taste this high-ABV, boozy monster. Was it even legally beer? It didn’t matter, because it eventually became a sensation, and by the 2010s Bourbon County’s Black Friday release date had created crowds if not mobs across the country, eager to score bottles of this O.G. and its countless variants.

Today: Goose Island was controversially acquired by AB InBev in 2011, but that didn’t seem to knock the luster off this beer. Today, it’s not exactly a cult sensation any more, but yearly variants that collaborate with legendary whiskey brands like Parker’s Heritage and Old Fitzgerald still remain potent.

Hair of the Dog Dave

1994

Before there were bourbon taters there were craft beer whale chasers: tickers par excellence chasing the rarest and hardest-to-land beer releases out there. Hair of the Dog Dave fit the bill to a tee, an oak-aged English barleywine made with 10 varieties of hops, then illicitly (shh) freeze distilled to get it up to a then-unheard of 29 percent ABV. Packaged in clear 375-milliliter bottles, it was initially sold for $80 at the Portland, Ore., brewery. By the time it topped a user-created White Whale List in 2012, it had become impossible to find, often selling for thousands of dollars. Ahoy!

Today: Hair of the Dog officially closed in 2022. Occasionally, people will still pull out a bottle of Dave to flex on the internet, though whale hunting is no longer a viable occupation.

Blue Moon

1995

At a certain point, macrobrewers would want their market share back, and so would edge into the craft beer game, if ever so discreetly. That tactic was most successful with this Coors product, first developed by Keith Villa to be sold at the microbrewery within the Colorado Rockies’ Coors Field. There were already wildly popular, industry-defining microbrews of this style in the market place — notably Celis White and Allagash White — so there was already consumer research that a beer of this Belgian-ish style could potentially be palatable for the masses. Indeed, this wheat beer brewed with Valencia orange peel and coriander would soon become a sensation, bolstered by bars that included an orange slice garnish on the rim of the branded, vase-like glass. The craft beer pedants may have dismissed this ersatz microbeer, but most people would eventually have to admit it was generally good for showing the hoi polloi that beers can be flavorful.

Today: If you consider it craft beer, it’s one of the best-selling in the U.S. Even if you don’t, it’s a near- $300 million brand moving millions of cases per year.

New Belgium La Folie

1997

Barrel aging would ultimately not only be for stouts and other big beers. Borrowing from the Belgian tradition of wood aging to create sour beers often infected with wild yeast and bacteria, La Folie was a Flanders-style oud bruin. Few Americans would have known of the style or ever tasted one before; in fact, most drinkers in the 1990s would have been repulsed, thinking the beer had gone bad! Instead, an entire subcategory of craft beer would arise with its own take on classic sour styles of yore — lambic and gueuze, wild ales and mixed fermentation beers, even those produced in coolships.

Today: Sour beer isn’t quite as hot as it used to be, but New Belgium (now owned by Kirin) still laboriously makes a new batch of La Folie each year, and it remains quite good.

Russian River Pliny the Elder

2000

While not the first double IPA, this was perhaps the first that was palatable. In the mid-1990s Vinnie Cilurzo took his first crack at an IPA with “doubled” (well, not quite) the hops and ABV in brewing Inaugural Ale to celebrate the first anniversary of his own Blind Pig brewery. He claims it was way too bitter and astringent. After moving to Sonoma’s Russian River Brewing, he perfected the technique (and that of triple IPAs as well with little brother Pliny the Younger). By the time the beer was first bottled in 2008, it had become one of the most sought-after beers in the world, traded and swapped and illicitly mailed across the country to beer geeks eager to try it.

Today: Seemingly still as desirable as ever, it remarkably still ranks as Untappd’s fourth highest-rated DIPA currently being produced.

Oskar Blues Dale’s Pale Ale

2002

If craft beer had arisen as a rejection of the current state of beer, it wasn’t just a rejection of the taste of macro beer, but also a rejection of how it was presented and sold. To put a craft beer in cans was once seen as déclassé. That was until this Colorado brewery decided to only can its beer, starting with its flagship pale ale. The fact this pale ale was then one of the best of its style on the market allowed beer snobs to accept the can as a craft vessel; today, it’s pretty much all craft breweries use.

Today: Oskar Blues is now part of the Monster Beverage Corporation, after previously being a part of the CANarchy Craft Brewery Collective. Oskar Blues still comes in a can.

3 Floyds Dark Lord

2002

With few exceptions (see: Dogfish Head), craft beer was built on using “real” Reinheitsgebot-level ingredients to make beer. Then a small Munster, Ind., brewpub put on tap a 15 percent Russian imperial stout made with Mexican vanilla beans, Indian sugar, and Starbucks coffee. Back then, to add nonbeer ingredients to a beer was near-heresy. Dark Lord became an immediate hit among locals in this Chicago suburb, so much so that in April 2004, 3 Floyds offered wax-dipped bottles of Dark Lord. It quickly ascended to being Beer Advocate’s No. 1-ranked beer in the world, not just delicious, but rare. So rare, so desirable that by 2005 there was an entire Dark Lord Day, the only time and place one could score that year’s bottle. The success of this beer release bacchanalia would create a template for how to release a rare beer and other breweries would soon debut their own events — Surly’s Darkness Day (2006), Cigar City’s Hunahpu Day (2010), and others.

Today: This year’s Dark Lord Day was on May 16, when fans purchased $200 or $333 tickets to score the newest release along with even more coveted variants.

The Alchemist Heady Topper

2004

Available on tap for years at a small brewpub in rural Vermont, 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene would inadvertently introduce this beer and, in turn, the New England IPA (NEIPA) to the masses, spawning a cottage industry. With its brick and mortar washed away, The Alchemist had no choice but to focus all its attention on its little IPA that could, selling one beer and only one beer from silver-and-black cans with a “DRINK FROM THE CAN!” directive on the upper rim. Hazy, juicy, and hardly bitter, the NEIPA would become the beer style of choice and the “pounder can” the vessel that would soon dominate the industry.

Today: Still an icon, still as good as ever, though a little more readily available, the on-tap, hand-pulled version remains one of the few bucket-list beers still around.

Westbrook Gose

2012

In the late spring of 2012, this South Carolina brewery released a canned gose, a mostly obscure German style of kettle-soured wheat beer. (At the time “gose” didn’t even have an entry in Garrett Oliver’s 960-page “The Oxford Companion to Beer.”) By now, sour beers were starting to become a sensation, though they were costly and time consuming to make. The gose wasn’t, however, and adding fruit to it suddenly turned a tangy, tart beer into something crushable. An explosion of kettle soured beers followed, for many, their first ever introduction to sour beer.

Today: Westbrook still makes a good half-dozen goses, with everything from Key Lime Pie Gose to Orange Hibiscus Gose to Whipped Pineapple Gose and Grandma’s Apple Pie Gose.

Tree House Julius

2012

If Heady Topper invented the supposed New England-style IPA, Julius might have perfected it. Starting out of a brewing barn in rural Massachusetts, Tree House’s IPAs were so good that the lines eventually arrived. Today, its 130,000-square-foot, $18.5 million brewery in Charlton, Mass. (and its satellite locations; see below) are still the only places to get Julius (and countless Julius spin-offs like JJJuliusss, King Julius, and King JJJuliusss). It could be argued that Julius was the last craft beer that truly shook up the world.

Today: Tree House has become a Tree Empire with a half dozen brewing, distilling, coffee roasting, and even golf (!) locations in Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts. Julius is still the king.

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