What Legally Makes a Beer "Draft"? Not What You Think

You order “two drafts” at a bar after work. As the foam settles on a cold glass, the friend next to you asks: “Wait — what actually makes it ‘draft’? Isn’t it something about the yeast still being alive?” You hesitate, mumble “yeah, probably,” and move on.

The idea that “draft” means unpasteurized — no heat treatment, so the yeast survives — is a widely held assumption, and not just in one country. But hold it up against the actual text of the law and something odd happens: in none of the major beer markets does the legal definition of “draft” hinge on living yeast. Worse, the definitions don’t even agree with each other. Check the US, the UK, Japan, and Korea, and the same word turns out to mean four genuinely different things — one of which isn’t about the beer at all.

QUESTION

Ask most people what “draft” (or “draught”) beer means and you’ll get some version of this: beer poured from a keg through a tap, never heat-pasteurized the way canned or bottled beer is, so the yeast survives and it tastes “fresher.” If you’ve spent time in an American brewpub or argued about “real ale” in a British pub, this picture feels settled.

Peel it back, though, and it splits into separate questions. Does the law anywhere actually define draft beer as “unpasteurized”? If not, what does each country define it by — and why don’t they agree? And how do the lager/ale split and the “dark beer” category, both casually lumped in with “draftiness” in everyday talk, relate to whether a beer is “draft” at all?

Here’s the spoiler: four countries, four different legal yardsticks — a federal label rule, a private purist certification, an industry heat-treatment code, and, in one case, a tax rule that never mentions ingredients at all. Not one of them certifies that the yeast is alive.

CHECK

The US: the standard flipped in 2020

Start with the market English-speaking readers know best. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), the US federal agency governing alcohol labeling, ruled in a 1965 bulletin (Industry Circular 65-1) that terms like “Draft Beer” and “Draft Brewed” could be used only for beer dispensed through a tap or spigot, or for unpasteurized beer requiring refrigeration.^[1] So the mid-century American standard demanded both tap service and non-pasteurization at once — a fairly strict bar.

That held for almost 55 years. Then, following a 2018 proposed rulemaking (Notice No. 176), TTB implemented final rule T.D. TTB-158 in April 2020.^[2] Under the new rule, brewers can put “draft” or “draught” on labels and in advertising regardless of whether the beer is actually served on tap or pasteurized. “Draft” in the US today is closer to marketing copy than a legal fact — a canned beer can call itself “draft-style” without that saying anything about how it was served or treated.^[2] The meaning of the word changed inside a single country at one identifiable moment — a reminder that these standards shift by calendar year, not just by border.

The UK: “real ale” is a stricter, private axis

Cross the Channel and the yardstick changes shape entirely. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) — a private consumer-advocacy group, not a government body — defines “real ale” as beer “brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide.”^[3]

Two things stand out. First, this isn’t law; it’s a private certification run by a campaigning organization that decided only beer clearing this bar counts as “the real thing.” No government enforces it. Second, it’s far stricter than the American standard. Skipping heat treatment or serving from a tap isn’t enough: the yeast has to keep actively fermenting inside the cask, generating its own carbonation. A keg beer force-carbonated with injected CO₂ isn’t real ale no matter how fresh it is. The UK, in effect, runs a whole additional axis for “draftiness” that the other countries don’t even have a category for.

Japan: only heat treatment counts

Japan draws the line somewhere else again. The relevant standard is the Fair Competition Code Concerning the Labeling of Beer (「ビールの表示に関する公正競争規約」) — a self-regulatory industry code, not a statute — drawn up by the Brewers Association of Japan (ビール酒造組合) and approved by Japan’s Fair Trade Commission, the rough counterpart to the US FTC.^[4]

The code sets exactly one criterion: whether the beer was heat-treated. Any beer that skips heat pasteurization can be labeled 生 (nama, “raw”); any heat-treated beer cannot.^[5] This settled a genuine 1970s dispute among Japanese brewers over whether 生ビール (nama biiru, “raw beer”) required the yeast to still be alive or merely required skipping heat treatment. Japan’s Fair Trade Commission approved the code in December 1979 — landing on “any non-heat-treated beer is nama” — and it took effect in July 1980.^[4] The consequence is counterintuitive: a mass-market lager that’s been microfiltered (run through fine membranes to strip out the yeast, no heat involved), with essentially no living yeast left in it, can still carry the 生 label. The “draft equals living yeast” assumption doesn’t survive contact with a Japanese convenience-store fridge.

Korea: defined by the container, not the beer

Which brings us to the strangest case of the four. In Korea, the word for draft beer — 생맥주 (saengmaekju, literally “raw beer”) — first shows up in law not in a food-ingredient standard but in a tax provision. When Korea switched to volume-based beer taxation in 2020 (taxing by quantity rather than price), regulators added a tax-rate reduction to cushion the blow for draft beer specifically — and to grant it, they had to define the term. Their definition: beer sold in containers of 8 liters (about 2.1 US gallons) or more, through a separate dispensing apparatus. Beer that qualifies is taxed at 80% of the standard rate.^[6] The measure has been renewed repeatedly; a 2026 amendment extended it through December 31, 2026.^[7]

Read that again: nothing about heat treatment, nothing about living yeast. The law cares about exactly two things — container size and method of sale. Fully pasteurized beer, packed in an 8-liter keg and poured through a tap, is “draft beer” under the Korean tax code and collects the same discount. And that gap has real bite. In 2024, a Korean brewer released a bar-only, low-malt beverage — too low in malt to legally count as “beer” under Korean law — that some bars marketed with draft-glass imagery and “refreshing draft” slogans at 40–50% below real-beer prices.^[8] Questioned in Korea’s National Assembly in August 2024, the head of the National Tax Service conceded the labeling was improper and needed correcting.^[8] And if you’re wondering whether Korean law at least forces sellers to disclose pasteurization status: a review of the food labeling act and its notices turns up no such requirement — the “draft, therefore unpasteurized” instinct is industry habit, not a legal guarantee.^[9]

Four countries, four yardsticks

Line the four up and the divergence is stark. The same word — draft / 生 / 생 — points at a different axis in each place:

Nowhere in that table is “the yeast must be alive.” The one thing the folk belief is surest about is the one thing no legal definition bothers to certify.

So where do lager/ale and dark beer fit in?

At this point a natural confusion surfaces: “Is draft beer a lager or an ale?” The answer is that the question doesn’t really make sense, because the lager/ale split and “draft” status are independent variables.

What separates lager from ale is fermentation method. Lager uses bottom-fermenting yeast (Saccharomyces pastorianus) and ferments slowly at relatively low temperatures — roughly 7–13°C (45–55°F), a conventional brewing-practice range rather than a strict regulatory threshold. Ale uses top-fermenting yeast (S. cerevisiae) and ferments at higher temperatures — roughly 15–24°C (59–75°F).^[10] That’s a distinction about yeast species and fermentation temperature, with zero connection to pasteurization or tap service. So “draft lager” and “draft ale” are both perfectly coherent categories.

Dark beer (stout, porter, and the like) runs on a third, separate axis. Beer color isn’t set by fermentation method or pasteurization status — it’s set by how heavily the malt was roasted. From caramel tones to near-black coffee color, the industry quantifies roast level using color-measurement units like EBC (European Brewery Convention) or °Lovibond.^[11] Use heavily roasted malt and you get a dark “black beer” whether you started with a lager yeast or an ale yeast.

Put it together: fermentation method (lager/ale), color (pale/dark), and pasteurization-or-serving method (“draft” status, definition varying by country) are three genuinely independent axes. Which means, in principle, “pasteurized dark lager” and “unpasteurized dark ale” are both entirely coherent beers. The sense that the single word “draft” bundles a specific taste, color, and fermentation style together is closer to an optical illusion than a fact.

FACT

“Draft” points to a different thing at every border you cross. In the US it’s now essentially marketing language, unmoored from tap or pasteurization since 2020.^[2] In the UK, “real ale” is a private purist standard stricter than any of the others, demanding live secondary fermentation right in the cask.^[3] Japan forbids the 生 label on any heat-treated beer — yet lets microfiltered, yeast-free mass lagers wear it.^[5] And Korea, most improbably of all, defines its draft beer by the size of the container and the presence of a tap, in a clause of tax law that never once mentions what’s inside.^[6]

Notice what’s missing from all four: living yeast. The single fact the folk belief is surest about — that “draft” means the yeast is alive — is the one thing no legal definition anywhere bothers to certify. The word carries a promise about freshness that the law, in four different countries and four different ways, quietly declines to make. So the next time someone swears their pint is “proper draft,” the honest answer isn’t on the label — it’s in a tax schedule, an industry code, or a consumer group’s rulebook, depending on which country poured it.