Local beer makers want Floridians to develop a taste for microbreweries

This is a great article I found on Yahoo about educating the market and starting a brewery. This article focuses on Florida but it really could be applied anywhere.

Here is a small snippit

As the small but energetic brewing scene organizes, its players say the region's microbrew market is ripe for new options.
"Now people are starting to recognize what a good beer is," Monkey King co-owner Mark Anderson said.
Though Florida is the state responsible for the Hops microbrewery restaurant chain, which became ubiquitous in the 1990s, it has been relatively slow to embrace the craft beer trend.
But national production of craft beer — a term the industry uses for all-malt beers produced by small, independent and traditional breweries — has grown every year for the past 36 years, reports the Boulder, Colo.-based Brewers Association, a trade group for craft brewers.
Craft beers raked in $4.3 billion in sales last year, up from $3.8 billion the previous year, and production grew 9 percent, according to the association's figures.
That was double the growth rate for wine and triple the rate for liquor, the association reported.
Craft beer production is on track to grow 13 percent this year, said Paul Gatza, association director.
"We're in a period of pretty rapidly accelerating growth for this segment, and I think that's attributable to consumers changing their tastes," Gatza said. "We've seen that in other food industries. We've seen that in breads and coffees, and cheese is now becoming more of an artisanal product. ... People are going for fuller kinds of products, and they're willing to pay a little more for them."

For the rest of the article please visit this link: http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/business/epaper/2006/12/11/a1bz_microbrew_1211.html?cxtype=rss&cxsvc=7&cxcat=6