Glossary

One word, one meaning — and what it is not.

Brewers and winemakers use “lot”, “batch”, “run” and “removal” loosely, and the looseness costs money at reconciliation time. These are the definitions BrewCraft is built on, with the loose words named next to each one.

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Producers and sites

Producer: The licensed legal entity: the business that holds the federal excise licence, files its own excise returns and keeps its own books. The unit duty is calculated for.; Common mix-ups

Not a facility — one producer may run several sites.
Not a brand. Brands are families of products, and one producer may sell many.
Facility: A physical site a producer operates — a brewhouse, winery, warehouse or taproom — with its own address, time zone, vessels and storage locations.; Common mix-ups

Not a producer. Treating a site as the licensed entity makes excise returns impossible to produce.
Not a storage location: a facility contains many locations.
Associated group: Producers under common control whose production is combined when deciding which graduated excise duty tier applies.; Common mix-ups

Not an ownership chart, and not the same thing as sharing one software account: associated producers may keep entirely separate books.

Materials and purchasing

Material: A type of input — a malt, a hop variety, a can size. The catalogue entry, with a default unit, allergen flags and a shelf-life policy.; Common mix-ups

Not a material lot. A material has no quantity and no expiry; those belong to a lot.
Material lot: A specific received quantity of a material, with the supplier’s lot code, received date, expiry, cost and measured attributes such as hop alpha acid or malt crop year. The starting point of every upstream trace.; Common mix-ups

Not a batch, not a finished-goods lot, and not “inventory” in general.
Certificate of analysis: The supplier’s lab document attached to a material lot. For hops, it is where the measured alpha acid that rebalances a recipe comes from.
Receipt: The physical event of accepting goods against a purchase order, which creates material lots.; Common mix-ups

Not an invoice. Receiving is physical and billing is financial, and the two routinely disagree.
Also called a goods received note (GRN) — understood, but not the term used here.
Landed cost: The true per-unit cost of a material lot: purchase price plus freight, customs, brokerage and currency conversion.; Common mix-ups

Not the purchase-order price. The gap between the two is a routine source of margin error.

Recipes

Recipe: A named formulation — a container for its versions, with no ingredients of its own.; Common mix-ups

Not a product or SKU: one recipe can fill cans and kegs, and one SKU can be filled from different recipes over time.
Recipe version: A numbered, unchangeable formulation — ingredients, process and targets at a reference size. Batches point at a version, so changing a recipe can never rewrite what an earlier batch was.
Grain bill: The fermentable ingredients of a recipe version.; Common mix-ups

Not a “mash bill”, which is whisky usage.
Scaling: Projecting a recipe from its reference size to a batch size. Hop utilisation, boil-off and trub loss do not scale in proportion, so it is never plain multiplication.

Production

Batch: One production run of one recipe version, from brew day or crush to packaging, with its planned and actual volumes at every stage. Every litre belongs to exactly one batch.; Common mix-ups

Not a lot, not a brew session (a batch can span several) and not a packaging run (one batch can feed several).
Brewers say “brew”, “gyle”, “run” or “job”; winemakers often say “lot”. All understood, none used as the name.
Brew session: One trip through the brewhouse: one mash, one boil, one knockout. A batch larger than the brewhouse is several sessions knocked out into one fermenter — a “double brew”.; Common mix-ups

“Gyle” is the traditional word for one brew length; recognised, not used as the name.
Vessel: Equipment that holds product — mash tun, kettle, fermenter, brite tank, serving tank — with its capacity, current contents and cleaning history.; Common mix-ups

Not a storage location. What is in a vessel is work in process belonging to a batch.
Transfer: Moving volume from one vessel to another. Both the volume that left and the volume that arrived are recorded, and the difference is a recorded loss — never a silent rounding.
Blend: Combining volume from two or more batches into a new batch whose traceability parents are all the contributors, in recorded proportions.
Loss: Volume that left a batch without becoming saleable product, with a reason: trub, transfer, filtration, sampling, spillage, dumping. A litre nobody can account for is a reconciliation failure, not a tolerance.
ABV (measured and calculated): Alcohol by volume. The figure calculated from original and final gravity is an estimate; the figure measured on the packaged product is the one that decides the duty tier. Both are kept and neither overwrites the other.

Winemaking

Product class: Beer, wine, cider, spirit, ready-to-drink or non-alcoholic. It selects the duty regime, the production lifecycle and the labelling rules.; Common mix-ups

Not a style. A Pinot Noir and a Chardonnay are both wine.
Vineyard block: A managed part of a vineyard: one variety, clone, rootstock, planting year and trellis. The unit of harvest and the starting point of a wine trace.; Common mix-ups

Not a row, and not a whole vineyard.
Harvest: Picking fruit from a block on a date, with tonnage, sugar, acidity and condition.; Common mix-ups

“Pick” is one harvest event; “crush” is a separate step later. Conflating them loses the weight-to-juice yield.
Grape intake: Receiving fruit at the crush pad — weighed, sampled, accepted or rejected.; Common mix-ups

Not a harvest. Fruit picked and fruit received differ, and the difference matters when buying by weight.
Press run: Separating juice or wine from solids into fractions — free run, light press, hard press — that are often kept as separate batches because they are genuinely different wines.
Vintage: The year the fruit was harvested. Part of the product’s identity: two vintages of one wine are two products, not two lots of one.; Common mix-ups

Not the bottling year, and not the release year.
Varietal composition: The grape varieties in a batch and their shares, carried through every blend — because varietal and appellation label claims depend on it.
Appellation: The regulated geographic designation a wine may claim, which depends on where the fruit came from, the varietal composition and sometimes the method.; Common mix-ups

Not the vineyard name, and not a marketing region.
Barrel: An individually identified oak vessel with its cooperage, toast and fill count. Three things at once: a vessel holding wine, a depreciating asset and a flavour input that fades with each fill.; Common mix-ups

Not a plain tank, and not a US beer barrel, which is a unit of volume.
Topping: Replacing volume lost from a barrel to keep oxygen out. A top-up is a small blend, and the source of the wine added is recorded like any other blend.
Ullage: The headspace in a partly empty vessel — the loss that topping corrects.; Common mix-ups

Not the “angel’s share”, which properly refers to evaporation in spirits ageing.
Racking: Moving wine off its sediment. A transfer like any other, so both volumes are recorded and the difference is a loss.
Estate: Fruit grown on the producer’s own land, as opposed to purchased fruit or custom crush. “Estate bottled” is a regulated claim with conditions attached.; Common mix-ups

Not a marketing phrase.
Custom crush: A winery making wine owned by someone else — the wine equivalent of contract brewing. Whose wine it is decides who owes duty on it.

Quality and traceability

Hold: A block that stops a batch or lot being released or shipped, with a reason, an owner and an explicit release by an authorised person.; Common mix-ups

“Quarantine” is the everyday word; same thing.
Release: The authorised, signed decision that a batch or lot may be sold. A gate, not a status flag: nothing ships without one.
Traceability link: A recorded edge from a consumed lot to the lot it produced. Together they form the graph a recall is traced through.
Mock recall: An exercise tracing a finished lot back to every material lot (one back) and forward to every customer who received it (one up).

Packaging and finished goods

Packaging run: Drawing volume from a vessel and filling it into containers, with the volume drawn, units produced, waste and the lot code applied.; Common mix-ups

Not a batch, and not a finished-goods lot — a run produces lots.
SKU: A sellable configuration: the drink, its container and its pack. A can four-pack and a keg of the same beer are two SKUs.; Common mix-ups

Not a recipe, and not a product family.
Finished-goods lot: A quantity of one SKU from one packaging run, sharing one date code and best-before date. The starting point of every downstream trace.; Common mix-ups

Not a material lot and not a batch: one batch makes many finished lots; each lot comes from one batch.
Date code: The human-readable code printed on the container that maps back to a finished-goods lot.; Common mix-ups

Not the lot’s identifier. The printed code points to the lot; it is not the key.
Keg: Two different things that share a word: the keg SKU (the beer sold, in litres) and the keg asset (the steel vessel that goes out to a customer and comes back). A keg leaving the dock is a sale of beer, the movement of an asset and a deposit owed, all at once.; Common mix-ups

Never one unit of inventory.

Inventory and sales

Inventory movement: The permanent, append-only record of a change in quantity. Stock on hand is derived from movements; it is never a number someone edits.
Work in process: Value and volume inside batches — in a fermenter or brite tank — that is neither raw material nor finished goods, and still belongs in the inventory valuation.
On hand and available: On hand is physical. Available is on hand minus allocations, holds and reservations. Selling against on hand is how a producer promises beer it has already committed.
Channel: The route to market — provincial board, private retail, licensee, taproom, direct to consumer, export — which decides pricing, tax treatment, markup and reporting.; Common mix-ups

Not a customer, and not a province: one customer can buy through more than one channel.
Listing: A SKU’s registration with a provincial board, with the board’s own product number and status. Without one, that SKU cannot be sold to that board.
Allocation: Reserving specific finished-goods quantity against a sales order line, which turns on-hand stock into committed stock.
Customer licence: A licensee customer’s provincial permit and its expiry, checked when the order is entered rather than discovered at month end.
Empties: Returnable containers coming back — keg assets and deposit-bearing containers — usually collected on the same stop as a delivery.

Duty, markups and fees

Excise duty: Federal duty payable to the Canada Revenue Agency, under two different statutes. Beer falls under the Excise Act: charged per hectolitre and assessed at packaging, on what is produced each production day. Wine falls under the Excise Act, 2001: charged per litre, imposed at packaging, and payable then unless the wine goes straight into an excise warehouse.; Common mix-ups

Not a sales tax and not a provincial markup. Duty is part of cost, not added at the till.
Not triggered by removal for beer — the most common mistake, because it is true of warehoused wine.
Provincial markup: A liquor board’s own charge, applied by a formula that differs by province, container, strength and the producer’s volume. Paid to the board, not to the federal government.; Common mix-ups

Not duty and not tax.
Container deposit: A provincial, per-container amount collected on sale and refunded when the container comes back. A liability for as long as it is held, not revenue.; Common mix-ups

Not a stewardship fee. Deposits come back; fees do not.
Stewardship (EPR) fee: A provincial, non-refundable extended-producer-responsibility charge that funds recycling, set per container by material.; Common mix-ups

Not a deposit.
Duty status: The excise state of a volume, kept on a ledger parallel to physical stock — the same case of beer is one row of inventory and one row of duty state, reconciled rather than merged. Beer and wine have different sets of states, because their statutes differ.
Removal: Wine leaving excise control for the Canadian market. A wine concept: for beer, duty is assessed at packaging and removal is not a duty event.; Common mix-ups

“Entered for consumption” is the statutory phrasing for the same idea.
Reconciliation: The periodic proof that production, packaging, losses, removals and stock on hand balance. If it does not balance, something upstream is wrong and no return should be prepared from it.
Effective dating: Every rate, price and rule is looked up as “the value in force on this date”, never “the current value” — so a return for one month uses that month’s rates, whenever it is prepared.

Units

Hectolitre: One hundred litres. The unit beer excise duty is charged in.
US beer barrel: A US unit of volume many Canadian brewers think in, because their equipment was built to it. Fine for display and entry; never the unit anything is stored or reported in.; Common mix-ups

Not a keg, and not an imperial barrel.

One meaning per word, all the way down.

These definitions are the ones BrewCraft is specified against. It is in private beta, onboarding a limited number of Canadian producers, and early partners shape what it does next.

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