The Brewers Association Craft Brewer Definition
The phrase "craft brewer" sounds like it ought to describe a person — someone in rubber boots, hosing down a mash tun at six in the morning. In American trade-association usage, however, it describes a corporate entity that satisfies three numerical and structural tests laid out by the Brewers Association in Boulder, Colorado. The definition is, on close inspection, a slightly unusual artifact: a private trade group's membership criterion that has acquired enough weight to shape federal economic statistics, supermarket shelf labels, and the small green seal on the side of a beer can.
What the definition actually says
The Brewers Association, the principal US trade group representing small and independent brewers, publishes its Craft Brewer Definition on its website. The current definition, according to the Brewers Association, rests on three tests that an American brewer must satisfy to qualify:
- Small. Annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less. The barrel here is the US beer barrel of 31 gallons, which is the same unit the Tax and Trade Bureau uses for federal excise tax purposes under 26 USC § 5051.
- Independent. Less than 25 percent of the craft brewery is owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by a beverage alcohol industry member that is not itself a craft brewer.
- Brewer. The entity has a TTB Brewer's Notice and makes beer.
That third criterion sounds redundant until one remembers that a great many companies sell beer without making it. Contract arrangements, alternating proprietorships, and pure marketing companies are all common in the modern beverage business, and the Brewers Association has chosen to draw its line at organizations that actually hold the federal brewing permit described in 27 CFR Part 25.
The definition is published in full at the Brewers Association's website and is updated periodically. It is, importantly, the Brewers Association's own definition for the Brewers Association's own purposes. It is not a federal statute. It does not appear in the Internal Revenue Code, in the Federal Alcohol Administration Act at 27 USC § 211, or in the Tax and Trade Bureau's beer regulations. The TTB cares about who paid excise tax on what volume of beer; it does not care, for regulatory purposes, whether the brewer is independent of Anheuser-Busch InBev.
A short history of where the numbers came from
The current ceiling of 6 million barrels did not arrive fully formed. For most of the modern era of American small brewing, the threshold sat at 2 million barrels, which was also the cap used in the small brewer tax differential first established in the federal excise tax code. In 2010 the Brewers Association raised its production ceiling to 6 million barrels, a move widely understood to keep the Boston Beer Company — the maker of Samuel Adams, then expanding rapidly — inside the tent. The independence test of 25 percent foreign ownership was added and refined over time, and the language was rewritten in 2018 to its current three-part form, with the production threshold staying at 6 million barrels.
The 6-million-barrel figure should be read in context. According to the Brewers Association's National Beer Stats, total US beer production runs in the range of roughly 200 million barrels per year across all brewers, which means a single craft brewer at the ceiling could in principle account for around three percent of US output and still be considered "small" by trade-association arithmetic. This is one of those edge cases worth saying out loud: a brewery that produces five million barrels of beer is, in everyday English, an industrial operation with a national logistics network. In Brewers Association terms, it is small.
How this differs from the federal tax definition
The federal government also uses the word "small" in connection with brewers, but it draws the line in a different place. Under 26 USC § 5051, as amended by the Craft Beverage Modernization Act provisions now codified there, the reduced rate of federal excise tax applies on the first 60,000 barrels of domestic production for brewers producing less than 2 million barrels annually, and a reduced-but-higher rate applies to barrels above that for all brewers up to a certain ceiling. The arithmetic of those tiers, and the precise current rates, is laid out in the statute itself and discussed in TTB's beer regulatory pages.
The point of mentioning this is that the federal government's notion of "small brewer" — the one that determines actual tax dollars — uses a 2-million-barrel inflection point, not 6 million. A brewery can therefore be:
- Craft and small for tax purposes (under 2 million barrels, independent, holds a Brewer's Notice).
- Craft but not small for tax purposes (between 2 and 6 million barrels).
- Small for tax purposes but not craft (under 2 million barrels, but more than 25 percent owned by a non-craft beverage alcohol company).
The fact that two perfectly reasonable definitions of "small" coexist for the same product, one written by Treasury and the other written by a trade association in Colorado, is the kind of taxonomic accident that beer regulation produces in great quantity.
The Independent Craft Brewer Seal
In 2017 the Brewers Association introduced the Independent Craft Brewer Seal, a small upside-down beer bottle silhouette that licensed member brewers can place on packaging and marketing material. According to the Brewers Association's seal page, the mark is available without licensing fee to brewers who meet the craft definition and sign a usage agreement.
The seal exists because the definition, on its own, is invisible to a shopper standing in front of a cooler. A buyer who wants to know whether a given six-pack comes from an independent brewer cannot easily extract that information from the label, which is governed by 27 CFR Part 7 and concerns itself with brand name, class and type, alcohol content, government health warning per 27 CFR Part 16, and similar regulatory furniture. Whether the brewer is 24 percent owned by a global brewing conglomerate or 100 percent employee-owned is not a label requirement. The seal is the trade association's attempt to make ownership structure legible at retail.
The seal has had its share of edge cases. Brewers acquired by larger non-craft beverage companies lose the right to use it, and the list of who is and is not eligible has shifted over the years as the industry consolidates.
What the definition is used for
The Craft Brewer Definition is doing more work than a typical trade-association membership rule. Several distinct applications:
- Statistical reporting. The Brewers Association publishes annual production, growth, and economic impact figures sliced by craft versus non-craft. Its National Beer Stats and Economic Impact Data pages are widely cited in journalism, by analysts, and by lawmakers. The numbers reported as "craft" reflect this specific definition and not any other.
- State-level analysis. The Brewers Association's State Craft Beer Stats use the same definition for state-by-state comparisons of breweries per capita, economic impact, and production.
- Membership eligibility. Voting membership in the Brewers Association is generally tied to meeting the definition.
- Comparative trade context. Coverage of the US beer industry from the Beer Institute, which represents brewers of all sizes including major multinationals, often references the Brewers Association figures alongside its own. The two organizations measure overlapping but distinct slices of the same industry.
When a news article reports that "craft beer's market share rose to X percent," that figure almost always traces back through the Brewers Association's data series, and therefore through this definition, with all of its specific cutoffs.
Comparisons abroad
The American framing is unusual. Most other beer-producing countries do not have a comparable trade-association definition that combines a production ceiling with an independence test and a label-visible seal.
In Belgium, the High Council for Artisanal Lambic Beers, HORAL, defines membership around production method — spontaneous fermentation, traditional turbid mash, aging in wood — rather than around ownership and volume. The Authentic Trappist Product designation administered by the International Trappist Association concerns where and by whom the beer is brewed, specifically within the walls of a Trappist monastery and under the responsibility of the monastic community, with profits directed to the order or to charitable purposes.
In Germany, the Reinheitsgebot tradition overseen historically through the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture defines beer by ingredient, not by brewer size. The Deutscher Brauer-Bund represents the German industry without a formal craft-versus-non-craft schism of the American kind.
In the United Kingdom, the Campaign for Real Ale, CAMRA, has long defined "real ale" by serving method — cask-conditioned, secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed — rather than by company structure. The British Beer and Pub Association represents the trade as a whole.
What unites the American Craft Brewer Definition with these other framings is that all of them are attempts to draw a line around something the writer wishes to protect or distinguish. What separates them is which axis the line runs along. The Brewers Association chose ownership and scale. HORAL chose process. ITA chose place and purpose. CAMRA chose dispense.
Common misreadings
A few misunderstandings appear regularly in casual writing about American beer.
- "Craft means small." Not exactly. A brewer at 5.9 million barrels is craft by definition. A brewer at 50,000 barrels owned 30 percent by a non-craft beverage company is not.
- "The TTB recognizes craft brewers." It does not, in any formal regulatory sense. TTB licenses brewers, collects excise tax under 26 USC § 5051, and enforces labeling under 27 CFR Parts 7 and 16. The agency does not adjudicate craft status.
- "Craft is a legal term." It is a trade-association term used contractually with members and seal licensees. Some state laws reference small-brewer tiers for distribution or licensing purposes, but these typically use volume thresholds rather than the Brewers Association's three-part test.
- "Once craft, always craft." Brewers can lose the designation by exceeding the production threshold, by being acquired beyond the 25 percent ownership threshold, or by ceasing to brew. The Brewers Association updates its lists accordingly.
Why the definition keeps moving
A definition written by a trade association on behalf of its membership will, over time, reflect the membership's circumstances. The 2010 increase to 6 million barrels accommodated the largest member at the time. The 2018 restructuring into three explicit tests responded to the rise of contract brewing, hard seltzer, and other beverages that complicated what "brewer" meant in practice. Future revisions are plausible whenever the industry's shape changes enough that the existing line stops drawing a useful boundary.
This is not a flaw. A regulator's definition needs to be stable for due-process reasons; a trade association's definition needs to remain useful for its members. The two operate under different pressures and produce different kinds of texts. The Craft Brewer Definition is the latter, and reads like it: short, plainspoken, periodically revised, and openly tied to its authors' interests.