Tap Beer vs. Draft Beer

There’s virtually no difference. I read about this a lot, and most resources agreed that the terms are essentially interchangeable.

A “draft” is another name for a keg. A “tap” is the thing you stick into a keg to get beer out of it. In modern days, this was evolved to be a series of pipes and hoses to get it from a refrigerated key to a tap behind the bar.

So, in most cases, the words are used together: “draft” beer is served via a “tap.” They’re not mutually exclusive categories.

Some resources said that carbonation is added to “tap” beer during this process, other resources applied that description to “draft” beer. In fact, from resource to resource, the same descriptions were alternately applied to “tap” and “draft.”

(I deeply suspect some of these resources were written by AI. They were suspiciously repetitive and summarized themselves often.)

In the end, I couldn’t find any meaningful difference.

Why I Looked It Up

I just always wondered.