Scottish brewer says craft label no longer fits corporate beer industry

Andrew McKnight says the beer trade has pushed the word “craft” past its sell-by date, because too many of the brands still using it now sit inside giant brewing groups. The chief executive of Harviestoun Brewery in Alva said the term began as a reaction to big brewers, a shorthand for “small” and “artisan” producers, but no longer means much if the ownership has changed hands.

McKnight said “independent” might be the better word, but called it politically loaded in Scotland because of the independence debate. That is the problem in a nutshell: drinkers are being asked to trust a label that no longer tells them who owns the brewery, who controls the brand, or where the money goes when a six-pack leaves the shelf.

The timing is brutal. BrewDog collapsed into administration after closing 38 bars and shedding nearly 500 jobs, while Tilray Brands bought 11 of its bars in a £33 million pre-pack deal. Around the same period, Innis & Gunn also went into administration and was sold to C&C Group for £4.5 million, a deal that brought brewery and taproom closures and more job losses. McKnight said trading conditions were “very testy”, with energy costs climbing alongside higher oil and gas prices tied to conflict in the Middle East.

The wider numbers back up the mood. SIBA said the UK had 1,715 breweries at the start of 2025, down from 1,815 a year earlier, then warned that closures averaged nearly three a week in 2025. By the start of 2026, that figure had fallen again to 1,578 breweries, a 37% spike in closures that left the sector talking openly about survival rather than growth.

That is why the argument is shifting from branding to ownership. SIBA launched its Indie Beer mark in 2024 to help drinkers separate genuinely independent breweries from labels backed by global brewing giants, and its research found three-quarters of people thought that kind of ownership-led marketing was misleading. CAMRA has backed the campaign, while the Brewers Association in the United States uses a harder test: small, independent and traditional, capped at 6 million barrels a year and with less than 25% ownership or control by a non-craft beverage alcohol producer.

For drinkers and retailers, the useful markers are getting clearer. Who owns the brewery, who controls the brand, how much beer it sells, and whether it carries an independent mark now matter more than the old, fuzzy comfort of “craft.”