Beermad's definition of brewery/brand types:
Working out how to classify breweries, brands, etc. is is a difficult art. This is how Beermad has decided to separate the various types out.

brewery	This is defined as being where the brand under which a beer is sold is the same as the name as the particular brewery where it's produced. In a small number of instances, this will refer to a brewer who uses someone else's brewing plant to do their own brewing (as opposed to getting that third party to brew for them.)
brand	A brand is taken to be a subsidiary name of the brewery which brews the beer. For example, Dorothy Goodbody is a brand-name given to a number of beers brewed by Wye Valley so is given its own entry in order that anybody seeing Dorothy Goodbody on a pump-clip and looking for it will find it straight away. Brands would normally be cross-referenced from the brewery's own entry so you can find them (if I've remembered.)
contract brewer	What Tim Webb describes as "brewers without breweries"; people who don't actually brew the beer sold under their name but contract out the brewing process. Contract brewers vary from those who specify every detail of beers which are produced for them to those who just "badge-engineer" beers from other breweries. Beermad doesn't differentiate between these due to lack of certain data and avoidance of litigation. An example of a contract brewer might be Hoskins Brothers whose beers are brewed for them at Tower.
normally keg only	A producer which doesn't normally produce real ale. These are usually listed where they sometimes brew proper stuff, for example Zerodegrees' beers are normally keg, but occasionally make it into barrels in an un-filtered state (and very good they can be!) Only beers believed to have been available in a real form are listed.
other name	In order to make it a bit easier to find breweries/brands whose names have variants that people might search for, or where a brewery has changed its name. Beermad uses the "othername" designation to allow these to be searched for. An othername entry would normally not have any beers under it, but would contain a link to the actual brewery or brand. An example of this is the Mardle Hall brewery, which is the original name for Buffy's. Othername entries are also put in the database where the names of one or two beers from a brewery share a prefix, but there aren't enough of them to constitute a brand as such.