It’s tempting to call any beer that isn’t brewed by a major label a “microbrew,” and in many cases you’d be correct in doing so. But you wouldn’t be hep to the vagaries of nomenclature that will grant entry into the company of beer snobs and impress your less enamored friends. (At least until you start acting like a total pedant about it and everyone chooses to drink as far from you as possible.)

• Microbrewery: Various definitions say a microbrewery produces less than 15,000 or 10,000 barrels of beer a year. Other definitions imply that a microbrewery only sells its products at its place of manufacture. Other definitions nod towards its U.K. origins, describing boutique breweries that provide the casked ales that are the mainstay of traditional English pubs. See the problem?

In America, the best argument for abandoning the term entirely is that it symbolizes the aborted trend of the early ’90s of opening mediocre restaurants that brewed beer on location, most of which produced seriously iffy beer and went out of business, casting a pall over the alternative brewing scene in America for nearly a decade. Those restaurants would have been more properly termed…

• Brewpubs: A bar which serves beer that was brewed on site. See how simple that was?

• Regional Brewery: A nice, broad term that describes breweries whose products are only available in their immediate regions. (Although in the United States, that region can extend to multiple, non-contiguous states.) It could be used to describe the hundreds of breweries that existed before Prohibition or the hundreds of breweries that have sprung up over the last couple of decades, inspired in no small part by Anchor Brewing of San Francisco. Personally, we find it to be a usefully broad term to describe what we’re looking for when we sit down at a new bar in a new city.

• Craft Brewery: Nearly synonymous with “regional,” craft brewery infers an adherence to the modern American craft brewing practices, such as a staunch avoidance of ingredients like rice or corn. Neither “regional” nor “craft” strictly imply a given size, but to our mind the latter suits smaller breweries better.

Groups such as the Brewers Association tend to use the term “craft beer” as well, as they did in a report noting an 11 percent increase in sales of craft beer in 2006 over the same period in 2005.

In summary, ditch the term “microbrew” and start using “craft” or “regional beer.”