Very recently--it might even have been at the beginning of last week--I considered whether we'd come to the end of the first age of brewery consolidation. Well, that was ill-timed. First came news that Wicked Weed, the belle of Asheville's ball, was throwing in with AB InBev. Then Tony Magee made a very strange announcement that he was selling the second half of Lagunitas to Heineken.

While I'm on confessions, let me mention another: I also thought the world of craft beer had adjusted well enough to the age of consolidation that it would be inured to freak-out. Well, not only did the Wicked Weed news cause a freak-out, but it was led by other brewers, not just customers. Jester King kicked things off, followed by the Rare Barrel and Black Project. The announcement came a bit before an annual Wicked-Weed hosted festival of wild ales, which a mass of breweries have decided to skip. (Customers were pretty angry, too.)

The age of consolidation has surfaced one of the more unusual quirks of the American craft beer segment: the strange morality that has come to pervade it. There's really no other word, either. Morality is that agreement among groups about what is acceptable. It is a self-protective urge, a code to minimize harm either through social norms or ones of purity. It enforces loyalty, which further strengthens the group. Although our friends the 18th-century philosophers tried to argue for a natural or universal morality, it's clear that morality is a purely a social construct that varies place to place. And there is a moral code both craft breweries and craft beer drinkers recognize, as this latest blowback demonstrates.

Within societies, moral violations are the most serious. Laws have one kind of power, but people forgive a tax cheat a lot sooner than they do a pedophile. To moral transgression, societies exact the harshest penalties--shunning for infractions or, most seriously, excommunication--expulsion from the group. Craft breweries have several different identities and associate themselves with others according to these (size, location, beer type, etc), but the unifying morality is independence. It is the taproot for all that has grown up around craft beer--the punk rock attitude, notions of "craft," fealty to authenticity, creativity, and a vague sense of wholesomeness.