What Makes a Beverage “Craft?”
CrushBrew Editorial · Craft Beverage · 7 min read
Craft beer, artisan wine, craft cocktails: what does it all actually mean? The word “craft” means many things to many people, organic, locally sourced, creatively produced, hand-made, small-batch, made with quality ingredients. Everyone has a definition, and that is exactly the problem: the meaning of craft is a little bit mutable. Here is how the term is used across beer, wine, spirits, and beyond, where it is defined with real precision, and how to tell whether something is truly craft.
Key Takeaways
- No single definition: “craft” is not legally regulated, so the term is genuinely mutable.
- Beer is the exception: the Brewers Association defines a craft brewer as small and independent.
- The rules changed: the “traditional” criterion was dropped from that definition in 2014.
- It spread: wine, spirits, cocktails, and even soda all now claim the craft label.
- The common thread: craft products have a story behind how and why they were made.
In This Article
What does “craft” actually mean?
Ask ten people and you will get ten answers: small-batch, hand-made, organic, locally sourced, creatively produced, made with quality ingredients. All of those capture part of it, but none is the whole. Sometimes it is easiest to describe craft beverages by what they are not: mass-produced, bland, and made with ingredients chosen more for price and convenience than quality.
“There’s always a tale behind it.”
— Jason Hamilton, on what makes a beer truly craft
Jason Hamilton, who ran the beer program at Barrel Down, a downtown Los Angeles craft beer hall that has since closed, captured the spirit of it well. For him, a true craft brew always carries a story, how it was made, how it was sourced, and why it was created. That narrative, the human decisions behind the liquid, is what separates craft from a product engineered purely for scale and consistency.
How is craft beer defined?
Beer is the one category with a widely accepted definition. The Brewers Association defines an American craft brewer as small and independent. Notably, the definition used to have a third pillar, “traditional,” but the association dropped it in 2014, recognizing that craft brewers experiment freely with both classic and unconventional ingredients.
Definition
Craft brewer
By the Brewers Association’s definition, a craft brewer is small and independent: it produces no more than 6 million barrels of beer a year, and less than 25% of it is owned or controlled by a beverage-alcohol company that is not itself a craft brewer. There is no legal definition, so this is the most widely used standard.
| Pillar | What It Means |
|---|---|
| Small | Annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less. |
| Independent | Less than 25% owned or controlled by a non-craft alcohol company. |
| Brewer | Holds a federal brewer’s notice and makes beer its main business. |
The association still treats innovation as a hallmark of craft, and to help drinkers cut through the confusion of big-brewery-owned “craft” brands, it introduced the Independent Craft Brewer Seal, an upside-down bottle logo that marks independently owned beer. A good example of craft innovation is the Holy Gose from Anderson Valley Brewing Company in Mendocino County, California. A light, 4.2% sour gose brewed with salt, wheat, coriander, and hops, it has a tangy, faintly salty pucker, crisp and summery and unlike almost anything else.
How does craft show up in wine, spirits, and soda?
Once beer made craft mainstream, the rest of the drinks world followed. Craft wine is made in small batches, prizes diversity and quality, and comes from producers outside the large corporate wineries that account for the majority of the wine sold in the country. Like craft beer, craft wine tells a story, about the varietals, the fermentation, the barrels or vats, and the terroir of the place the grapes grew. These makers shape wine for discerning drinkers rather than mass consumption.
Definition
Terroir
Terroir is the full set of natural factors, soil, climate, elevation, and geography, that give wine (and increasingly beer and spirits) a character unique to where its ingredients were grown. It is central to how craft wine tells the story of a specific place.
Spirits and cocktails have crossed into craft too. Craft distillers make small-batch, independently produced spirits that put a unique spin on traditional categories, and skilled bartenders have turned cocktails into an art form. That energy now extends to ready-to-drink canned cocktails, a category that barely existed a decade ago and has since exploded.
Even non-alcoholic drinks have joined the equation. Craft sodas lean on organic or high-quality ingredients and skip mass-market fillers like high-fructose corn syrup, and the non-alcoholic space has boomed well beyond soda, with a fast-growing wave of craft non-alcoholic beers and spirits made to be every bit as distinctive as their full-strength counterparts.
Why does craft matter, and how can you spot it?
Mass-produced beverages tend to prioritize the bottom line; craft ventures aim for an intimate connection with the people who buy them. The drinkers who seek out craft are often committed to a more responsible or sustainable lifestyle, or simply care about what is in the products they buy. In short, craft has created an educated market that is as passionate about what it consumes as the makers are about what they create. Spotting the real thing is mostly a matter of asking a few questions.
Frequently Asked Questions
🍻 Craft, at a Glance
A quick reference to what craft does and doesn’t mean.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Core idea | Small-scale, independent, hands-on, quality-driven production. |
| Craft beer (BA) | Small (6M barrels or less) and independent (under 25% big-alcohol owned). |
| Traditional pillar | Dropped by the Brewers Association in 2014. |
| Look for | The Independent Craft Brewer Seal on cans and bottles. |
| Craft wine | Small-batch, diverse wines outside the big corporate producers. |
| Craft spirits | Small-batch spirits and a booming ready-to-drink cocktail scene. |
| Beyond alcohol | Craft sodas and non-alcoholic drinks using quality ingredients. |
| The throughline | Every craft product has a story behind how it’s made. |
