What counts as independent
Why the plants owned by the big groups are deliberately left out, and where we draw the line when ownership is not obvious.
420 breweries are in our data and not in the directory. They are the ones owned by the international groups, and leaving them out is the single most opinionated decision on this site.
The reasoning
A brewery owned by one of the global groups does not need to be found. It has distribution, shelf space and an advertising budget. Putting it in the same list as a four person brewery does not help anyone: it pushes the small one further down the page and it lets the big one borrow a word it stopped earning a long time ago.
This is not a moral judgement about the beer. Some of those breweries make excellent beer and some have long and genuine histories. It is a judgement about what this directory is for.
How we decide
Three signals, in order of how much we trust them. First, the owner or parent company recorded in Wikidata. Second, the brand or operator tag on the map entry. Third, the name itself, when it carries a group name that leaves no doubt.
None of the three is complete. Ownership changes hands quietly, and open databases lag behind by years. A well known national brewery can sit in Wikidata for a decade with no owner recorded at all, which is exactly how one of the first ones we checked slipped straight past the automatic test.
So there is a list, kept by hand
The groups and their breweries are written down in a plain text file that a person edits. That is not elegant and it is not clever, but every automatic approach we tried was worse, and a list somebody maintains is at least honest about what it is.
Which means it will be wrong sometimes. If your brewery is independent and you cannot find it here, or if you spot a group brewery sitting in the list as though it were one of yours, tell us and it gets corrected.
The harder cases
Part ownership, minority stakes, breweries bought last year and still trading under their old name. The European definition of a small independent brewery draws its line at legal and economic independence rather than at ownership alone, and we lean on that thinking rather than on a single percentage.
When a case is genuinely unclear we would rather include the brewery and be told we got it wrong than quietly delete somebody's life's work from a list.
