The contract brewing debate is a red herring. Focus on intent.

Contract brewing won't be the end of craft beer. In fact, it's usually the beginning.

Success in a brewery often looks a lot like liquid Tetris. Brewers are constantly battling with the success of a few recipes over their desire to constantly explore new and unique offerings.

Contract brewing is an industry term for beer that’s brewed “under contract” at another brewery. There’s plenty of variations, but for all intents and purposes for the consumer, there’s four main set-ups that “contract brewing” is a verbal shortcut for.

1. Private label contracting — A brand, whether a brewing company, retail chain, or private group that has no actual brewing facilities hires someone to make their beer. This has been a common practice since beer production in America began, and it's long been a part of the wine and spirits trade. The contractor is responsible for the entire process, from recipe development to packing. All the hiring company gets in the end is a beer with their name on it.

2. Alternating proprietorship — A company can take over ownership of another brewery for a day to make their beer on someone else’s equipment. They make their own recipes, brew the beer themselves or with some help from dedicated staff.

3. Outsourcing — year-round beers take up a lot of room in a brewery. And once a recipe is dialed in after hundreds of batches and the public is consuming it like water, it’s often advantageous to brew these beers at another, larger facility to free up room for more innovative beers in-house. This can happen through a variety of means, with external partners or even internal outsourcing like Goose did within the Anheuser-Busch network for 312 and Honkers Ale.

4. Gypsy brewing — some companies craft recipes, build brands and brew beer all around the world with collaborators and partners they love working with. It's as much of a lifestyle choice as it is a business decision. Some people just don't like to be tied down to any one place and want to be able to experiment with different brewery setups and processes. Mikkeller makes even beer geeks uncomfortable with their success in this realm.

What’s the debate about?

When people criticize contract brewing as a blight on craft beer, they’re often being critical of someone for “not having any skin in the game.” When people make this argument, it’s often because they want to support brewers with a passion for the craft, with a real tie to the community and local economy rather than line the pockets of some vague marketing team or a business that’s just playing around. But here’s the thing — many of our greatest craft brewers used contracting as a tool to enter the market, expand, and serve their growing audiences when more concrete and steel just won’t do.

Sam Adams contracted out to macro brewers to become the nation’s largest craft brewer, forever changing consumer expectations in America. Chicago's Half Acre and 5 Rabbit breweries, like so many start-ups, contracted out of Wisconsin while they established a footprint in the city, where they took the brand in new and exciting directions. Nano brewers often contract with other nano brewers in Chicago whenever they’re swapping out brewhouses or installing new tanks as they grow. And successful craft brewers like Cigar City are using newly established contract-only houses in Florida to offload some of their year-round recipes to make room for more innovative beers at home. All of this means we get more brewers, and more beers into the market for a growing craft audience.

I’ve also seen this tool exploited in unfortunate ways — adding credence to the criticism. I’ve seen “alternating proprietorship” brew days where the contracting brewery never shows up to work — a bit like the mob on a construction site — leaving the entirety of the execution to a production staff that has little stake in the end product or brand. Instead, they focus on their website, hiring marketing staff and PR companies, and throwing events to "raise funds" for a brewery that never seems to get built. This will always happen. But you know what? I’ve also seen plenty of “real” breweries with a real footprint, with serious investment in concrete and steel, that care even less and make terrible beer. Owning equipment does not make a quality brewer. I don’t trust someone with a brewery unequivocally any more than I disregard someone who’s contracting based on that fact alone. If you care about craft beer enough to even have a stance on this issue, you need to go deeper. The vision and the people behind the product will always matter more than some dismissive, lazy buzzword.

And let's not forget how much easier it was to grab used brewhouses and fermentation tanks just a few short years ago. Gone are the days when you could be up an running in a few months based on a Craigslist search and $10,000. These days, getting equipment, which is all newly manufactured and perpetually behind schedule, requires some major planning, fund raising, and consideration for how you're going to launch and grow your brand even as you build a brewery underneath it.

What’s ahead?

In the coming year, we’re going to see this practice used even more, and in more obscure and interesting ways than the average consumer will ever be able to follow. Contract brewery specialists like the Brew Hubs that are popping up all over the country, devoting themselves to helping start-ups get out of the gate, and established brewers expand their reach into nearby states. These are new players in beer, and they’re critical to maintaining momentum. It’s not just capacity issues driving breweries to look for outsourced help — quality control is also keeping them up at night. When you’re producing 3,000 barrels for a 50 mile radius, you can handle most quality issues that arise. But you start shipping an IPA three states away through distributors with lackluster practices and retail accounts that care about velocity, you can’t afford to have quality mistakes. Many of these contracting specialists are founded by former macro brewers, and employ chemists you otherwise can’t afford unless you’re a national brand. Labs, superior packaging lines, and a focus you can’t always get when you’re managing taprooms, events, and sales mean these contractors are providing an unbelievable service to the craft beer community as important as new hop farms.

Rather dismissing brands because they were contract brewed, most consumers will be enjoying beers with unprecedented quality and consistency from their favorite breweries in 2014, regardless of where they were put into production. For craft geeks that want more of a direct line to their brewers, they will continue to enjoy the plethora of small brewers where they can satisfy this itch, but I'm wagering that their curiosity will grow toward the contract specialists they so often dismiss right now, as they become the next entryway for talent and new brands in America.

And “contracting" as a tool will continue to be redefined. Blending houses, where the brewed wort is brought in, mixed, and aged into barrels, will show up more in 2014. This is a european tradition, producing highly sought after Gueze and Lambic beers, that the US definition of a craft brewer simply wouldn’t accommodate for. We’ll need to make room in our hearts for some creative alternatives to the traditional brewery set-up and support people who are putting plenty of skin in the game, just not with the cookie-cutter approach of the 90s.