Term and Definition
What Is Craft Beer? Meaning and Definition
Craft beer is beer from a small, independent brewery that puts flavor before volume. A fixed definition only exists in the US. In Germany, "craft" isn't a legal term but a promise on the label that any brewery is free to make.
What does craft beer literally mean?
The English word craft means handiwork or skill. Originally it stood for a counter-movement: in the US of the 1970s, a handful of big breweries dominated the market with pale, mildly hopped lagers that tasted much the same from coast to coast. Small operations, by contrast, brewed pale ale, porter, or stout. These are top-fermented beers whose yeast works warm and in doing so produces fruity esters, aroma compounds reminiscent of banana, pear, or stone fruit. The term craft grew out of this movement, and it traveled to Europe around 2010.
Craft therefore doesn't describe a beer style. A craft beer can be a pilsner, a stout, or an alcohol-free wheat beer. What matters is who brews it and with what standards. The brewer chooses ingredients for flavor rather than price, tries out new hop varieties, and accepts that a batch may cost more. But if you see an IPA on a store shelf, you can't assume it comes from a small brewery. Large brewing groups have long been brewing their own beers in craft style.
How does the Brewers Association define craft beer?
The only widely used definition comes from the US brewers' trade group, the Brewers Association. It sets out three conditions. Small means: no more than six million barrels a year; a US barrel holds 117.3 liters, so that's just over seven million hectoliters. Independent means: less than 25 percent of the brewery may be owned by a beverage-alcohol industry member that is not itself considered a craft brewer. Brewer means: the operation holds a brewing permit from the US TTB, the agency that taxes and regulates alcohol.
Until 2018, the definition included a fourth criterion: traditional. The association dropped it in 2018. What remained were size, ownership, and brewing permit, three criteria that have nothing to do with what's in the glass. That's intentional. The definition describes who owns a brewery and leaves judgments about quality to drinkers. Smallness is relative here: six million barrels is an unimaginable amount for a brewpub with its own kettle, but a modest share in the vast US beer market.
Is there a definition for craft beer in Germany?
No. Germany has no legal definition for craft. Any brewery can put the word on its label, even a large corporation. What may legally be called beer at all is governed instead by the 1990 Beer Ordinance and Section 9 of the Provisional Beer Law. That law was repealed in 2005, but this section still applies. Under it, only barley malt, hops, yeast, and water are allowed for bottom-fermented beer. Top-fermented beer may also contain other malts and certain pure sugars, though not in Bavaria.
For German craft brewers, this means: anyone wanting to add coffee, fruit, or spices to the brew needs a special exemption from the state authority for a "special beer." According to the German Brewers' Association, such exemptions exist in every state except Bavaria. Many brewers therefore deliberately stick to the four classic ingredients and draw their variety from hop varieties, malts, and yeast strains. Since the 1987 European Court of Justice ruling, imported beers may be sold as beer in Germany if they're allowed to be called that in their country of origin.
How do I spot a craft beer on the shelf?
The word on the label alone won't tell you much. The back label is more useful: who brews it, where, and does the brand belong to a larger group? Some craft brands don't even have their own brewery. As contract brewers, known in English as gypsy brewers, they have their recipes brewed at other breweries' facilities. The Danish brand Mikkeller started out exactly this way in 2006, with its first beers brewed at a brewery in Belgium.
A second clue is openness about numbers. Small breweries like to list hop varieties, bitterness in IBU (milligrams of dissolved hop bittering compounds per liter), and original gravity, meaning the proportion of dissolved substances from the malt before fermentation. That's no guarantee of quality, though. Whether a craft beer succeeds ultimately shows in the glass: cleanly fermented, free of off-flavors like butteriness or wet cardboard, with a discernible idea behind it. Smallness alone doesn't make a beer better.