Glossary
Craft beer
A loosely-used term for beer from smaller, independently-owned breweries, with no single agreed definition and no boundary that survives contact with the industry.
Trade usage. Established by practice in the trade rather than by any formal definition.
The most-cited definition is the American Brewers Association’s, which sets thresholds for annual production and for the share of the brewery owned by an alcohol industry member. It is a specific, published definition — and it is a trade association’s membership criterion for one country, not a description of the beer.
The difficulty is that every version of the definition is about ownership and scale rather than about how the beer is made or how good it is. Several highly-regarded traditional European breweries fail it on size or age; several acquired former craft breweries make exactly the beer they made the day before the acquisition.
BeerHQ therefore treats "craft" as a description of the sector rather than of the product, and organises its catalogue by style, process and tradition instead.
Commonly misunderstood
Used as a quality claim. It is at best a statement about brewery ownership and scale, and different bodies draw the line in different places.
What this word used to mean
Historically
From the 1970s and 1980s, a small independent brewery making beer with more flavour than the industrial norm — a word that carried a genuine commercial and stylistic distinction because the alternative was a handful of very large producers making broadly the same pale lager.
Today
Contested, and doing less work than it appears to. It has never had a technical definition, several of the best-known "craft" breweries are owned by multinationals, and large brewers produce beers indistinguishable in style from small ones.
When it changed. Substantially from around 2011, as international brewers acquired a large number of the best-known independent breweries.
The word is frequently used as though it described the beer. It describes — at most — the ownership of the brewery, and increasingly not even that.
Related
- Microbrewery — A scale term with similarly loose usage.
- Brewpub — A more precisely-defined kind of brewery.
More vocabulary
Brewery tap · Brewpub · CAMRA · Contract brewing · Cru · Microbrewery · Real ale · Session beer · Small beer
See every term on the glossary index.
Last reviewed 2026-08-16.