By Christopher S. Stewart, FSB Magazine
December 8 2006: 9:50 AM EST
Denver (FSB Magazine) -- Normally, I don't drink beer before 5 on a workday. But it's Tuesday at 3:30, and I'm making an exception. Not because the world is too much - isn't it always? - but because FSB has tasked me with most Americans' dream job: to explore the booming business of American craft brewing.
I've come to Colorado, the second-largest beer-producing state in the
Union. Colorado may be home to Coors (Charts), but connoisseurs of inspired microbrews also know that with 92 small breweries - second to California's 224 and ahead of Washington's 80 - it's a fine place to hop off the slope and hit the tasting rooms.
This is a heady time for boutique beer producers all over the country. After an Internet-style rise and fall in the late 1990s, craft beers are on the climb again, with $4.3 billion in U.S. sales in 2005, a 13 percent lift from a year earlier. (By comparison, mass-market beer sales slipped 1.5 percent over the same period.)
In September the industry held the 25th anniversary of the Great American Beer Festival, the trade's equivalent of the Oscars, and attendance jumped from 29,000 in 2005 to a record 41,000
For the rest of the article see CNNMoney.com
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