A craft brewery is one that is small, independent and traditional. In the United States, the Brewers Association defines a craft brewer as producing 6 million barrels of beer or less per year, being less than 25% owned or controlled by an alcohol industry member that is not itself a craft brewer, and getting the bulk of its volume from traditional or innovative ingredients. None of that is a legal test.
That last sentence is where most confusion comes from. In the US the federal and state alcohol agencies that license breweries have no category called “craft.” Nobody fines you for printing the word on a can. So when people ask what counts as a craft brewery, they are usually asking about a marketing convention rather than a legal status, and the convention is drawn by a trade association that large breweries also belong to.
I drink through a lot of beer for this site and I have watched the argument change over the years. It used to be about taste. Now it is mostly about ownership. Updated for October 2026, here is the practical version.
Table of Contents
- What Counts as a Craft Brewery?
- Small: a production ceiling, not a vibe
- Independent: the ownership threshold
- Traditional: ingredients over flavored malt beverage
- How Is a Craft Brewery Different From a Large Brewery?
- Does Ownership Matter When Identifying a Craft Brewery?
- What Brewing Practices Usually Count as Craft?
- Is a Taproom or Experimental Brewery Automatically Craft?
- How Can You Tell What Kind of Brewery Made Your Beer?
- Why Do People Argue About the Definition of Craft Beer?
- Frequently Asked Questions
- What is a craft brewery?
- What qualifies a brewery as a microbrewery?
- Is Stella Artois considered a craft beer?
- Is Blue Moon considered a craft beer?
- What is the difference between a brewery and a brewpub?
- Why are craft breweries struggling?
- The Short Version
What Counts as a Craft Brewery?
In plain English, a craft brewery is a commercial brewery that makes beer its primary business, brews on a scale small enough that a person could plausibly know where the beer goes, and is not majority controlled by a company whose main job is selling mass-produced alcohol. The Brewers Association, a trade group founded in 1941 and best known today for its annual industry survey and economic impact reports, turned that sentence into three testable criteria in the 1990s.
The thresholds have been revised a few times. The size ceiling was 2 million barrels until 2010, then 6 million. The definition dropped its “adjunct clause” in 2014, which had required a majority of volume to come from traditional ingredients, and replaced it with a looser “traditional or innovative” phrasing.
Small: a production ceiling, not a vibe
A brewery qualifies as small if it makes 6 million barrels of beer or less in a year. A US beer barrel is 31 gallons, so that ceiling is roughly 186 million gallons. For scale, the largest breweries in the country run into the tens of millions of barrels, so the ceiling is generous rather than tight.
Independent: the ownership threshold
Independent means the brewery’s economic interest in the craft beer segment is owned 25% or less by an alcohol industry member that is not itself a craft brewer. Buyouts by multinational brewing groups, or investments by their venture arms, push a brewery out of the definition on the day the stake closes.
Traditional: ingredients over flavored malt beverage
Traditional means the majority of the brewery’s beverage alcohol volume comes from traditional or innovative brewing ingredients, not from flavored malt beverages. A flavored malt beverage is a malt-based drink with flavors added and little or no hops, and it does not count toward craft volume.
| Criterion | What the Brewers Association asks | Threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Small | Annual beer production volume | 6 million barrels or less |
| Independent | Economic interest held by a non-craft alcohol industry member | 25% or less |
| Traditional | Share of beverage alcohol volume from traditional or innovative ingredients | Majority of volume |
Worth saying plainly: the association has no inspectors and no penalty. The classification is useful as a shared vocabulary, not as a guarantee.
How Is a Craft Brewery Different From a Large Brewery?
The difference is control. At a large brewery, recipes are developed centrally, scaled across dozens or hundreds of thousands of barrels, and tested for consistency across every market the brand sells into. A brewmaster changes a hop charge once or twice a year because every change travels to all of them.
At a craft brewery, the person who decides what gets brewed is usually the person who brewed last week, and the batch is small enough that a bad experiment costs a tank of wort rather than a national recall. That is why local breweries can offer a rotating tap list while national portfolios hold a tight core lineup.
Scale also changes what “quality” means. A macro brewery can buy the same malt, the same yeast lab strain and the same hop variety every week, and pay less per unit because it buys tanker loads. Craft breweries buy smaller quantities at higher cost and have more variability in their raw material. You are not getting objectively better ingredients, you are getting ingredients that were picked and handled by people who had to live with the result.
Does Ownership Matter When Identifying a Craft Brewery?
Ownership is the criterion people care about most, and the one most often applied backwards. A brewery can be majority independent and put out dull beer. A big-owned brewery subsidiary can be staffed by obsessive brewers putting out genuinely interesting work. Craft status tells you about control, not about quality.
What ownership does tell you is who captures the money. Independent means the local family or founder still owns the business, the same jobs and the same tax base stay local, and the beer is not one line item in a portfolio reviewed by a conglomerate’s shareholders.
Acquired breweries are the gray zone people argue about most. A well-known Chicago brewery founded in 1988 was acquired by a Belgian multinational in 1995 and still describes itself as craft. Nobody is lying. The beer is made by the same people, and the definition technically no longer covers it. That is what a “formerly craft” label is for.
One edge case worth knowing: a large family-owned regional brewery in Pennsylvania remained independent and therefore still meets the ownership test even though its output is enormous and its beers are distributed far beyond its home region. Brewers themselves have publicly objected to the association revising the definition in ways that suit big members, which is one reason the thresholds move.
What Brewing Practices Usually Count as Craft?
None of these are legal requirements. They are the signals that separate a working brewery from a brand name on a can.
- It actually brews. Own equipment, run a kettle, make wort. That rules out the many “brewery” names that exist only on paper.
- Someone local makes the decisions. Recipe and production choices sit with people who work at that brewery, not with a marketing department across the country.
- It publishes its own numbers. Volume, ownership and sometimes brewery size appear on the site or the can, which makes verification easy.
- It takes ingredient risk. Single-hop releases, wild or cultured yeast, barrel programs, odd grain bills and hop-forward beers appear as regular production, not one-off publicity stunts.
- It has a room to sell beer in. A taproom or brewpub means the brewery is betting on direct sales, which changes how a beer has to hold up when the person drinking it has 20 minutes to decide.
The taproom point is the one that predicts longevity better than any label. Breweries that sell directly to the person drinking are not optimizing for shelf life.
Is a Taproom or Experimental Brewery Automatically Craft?
No. A taproom with no brewing on site is a bar. An experimental recipe with no brewed beer behind it is marketing. Those two categories fail in opposite directions, and both get called “craft” on a label.
The more common version of this is the contract brewery: one company owns the beer brand and recipes, a separate licensed brewery makes the beer to order, and the two are often the same handful of people. Some genuinely good beer is brewed this way, and ownership sits with the brand rather than the plant. It is why “who brewed it” and “who owns it” are two separate questions worth asking.
Co-packing and brewery-in-a-box models work the same way at larger scale. A large brand can be brewed at a regional facility under license, with a shelf life and a distribution strategy tuned for convenience stores rather than for the people who drink it.
Flavored malt beverages are the clearest signal of the opposite approach. When a malt-based drink gets its character from added flavor rather than from hops, fermentation and yeast, it is engineered to taste identical every time and in every market, which is a legitimate business choice and not a craft one.
How Can You Tell What Kind of Brewery Made Your Beer?
Five checks, in the order I would run them. They take about two minutes and settle most arguments.
- Read the can, not the ad. Look for the brewed-by line. If it names a real brewery in a real place, you are looking at an actual brewer.
- Look up the brewery page. RateBeer, Untappd and brewery websites usually list location, and increasingly list ownership.
- Search the brewery’s name plus “acquired” or “sold”. This is the fastest way to catch a formerly craft brewery that has not changed its branding.
- Ask the taproom directly. People behind the bar know who owns the place and what is brewed on site. They rarely mind being asked.
- Compare the tap list over a few visits. A place that changes its lineup is doing something. A place serving the same four domestic lagers for a year is not.
If a brewery will not say who owns it or what it makes, that tells you something too.
Why Do People Argue About the Definition of Craft Beer?
Start with the thresholds. A 6 million barrel ceiling is so high that regional breweries built for wide distribution sit comfortably inside “craft,” and the association that draws the line counts those breweries among its members. Drinkers notice the gap between the word and the volume.
Then add the fact that the term is voluntary and unattached to taste. Two people can agree completely on ownership and volume and still be arguing about beer quality, which means they are not really having the definitional conversation at all.
Regional culture makes it worse. A local brewery is a civic identity, so its beer carries local pride whether or not it earns that label. Someone who objects to a national brand calling its product craft is usually reacting to the branding, not to the brewing.
The UK has already reached the end of this road. Drinkers there were openly dropping the “craft” label because it had been taken over by large brewers and no longer meant much to anyone. An independent craft brewer seal was the attempt at a fix, and the word “independent” is doing most of the work in it now.
Meanwhile US craft production has been flat for several years, and the Brewers Association’s own figures show brewery closures outrunning openings. When the number of independent breweries is shrinking, the definition stops being a description of a healthy scene and starts being a way to defend it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a craft brewery?
A craft brewery is an independent commercial brewery that brews on a small scale using traditional or innovative ingredients and methods. In the United States, the Brewers Association defines one as small, independent and traditional: 6 million barrels or less a year, no more than 25% owned by a non-craft alcohol industry member, and a majority of volume from traditional or innovative ingredients. The label has no legal force.
What qualifies a brewery as a microbrewery?
A microbrewery is a small brewery producing 15,000 barrels of beer or less per year, which is roughly 465,000 gallons. Micro is the oldest informal label for a neighborhood-scale brewery. It does not describe ownership, so a microbrewery can be independently owned or it can be a small unit of a large company. The term is used loosely and no regulator tracks it.
Is Stella Artois considered a craft beer?
No. Stella Artois is a global lager brand owned by a multinational brewing group, brewed at scale in many countries, and it has not met the small or independent criteria at any point in its modern history. It is worth noticing that some mass lagers were historically marketed with words like premium and specialty before craft became the marketing word. The word changes; the ownership rarely does.
Is Blue Moon considered a craft beer?
Not today. Blue Moon was founded as an independent Colorado brewery in the mid-1990s and was acquired by a large international brewer in its first decade. It kept its name and its Belgian-style wheat beer, but the ownership test fails. This is the cleanest example of a formerly craft brand that still sits next to real craft beer on the same shelf.
What is the difference between a brewery and a brewpub?
A brewery makes beer. A brewpub is a brewpub when at least a quarter of the beer brewed there is consumed on the premises, and it operates as a bar or restaurant as well. A taproom brewery serves beer on site but usually without food service or a full bar license. The on-premises share is the practical dividing line, and it is why taprooms tend to be the most direct-to-consumer breweries.
Why are craft breweries struggling?
Independent breweries face higher ingredient and packaging costs, tighter taproom margins and a crowded market for shelf space. The Brewers Association’s recent figures show brewery closures running ahead of openings and craft production roughly flat, with national and international brands holding a large share of retail dollar value. Rising rates and slower local spending add pressure. Many closures are single-location taprooms that never reached volume.
The Short Version
What counts as a craft brewery is a small, independent, traditional business that brews beer as its main product, judged by volume, ownership and ingredients rather than by taste. Start with ownership, because it is the one criterion with a hard number attached: find out who owns the brewery behind the beer you are drinking.
Everything after that is a preference, and preferences are fine. Drink what you like. Just do not expect the word on the can to have done the thinking for you.
