Posted by: Ashby Foote, Guest columnist, Clarion-Ledger, Business, June 23, 2016.
If you are not a beer drinker you may have missed a profound shift in the adult beverage marketplace: Business for the big beer brands has gone flat.
Overall beer sales are doing fine, but all the excitement and growth is in craft beer — especially the small batch brewers which are sprouting up at a rapid pace. Since 1989, the number of breweries in the U.S. has exploded from 89 to 4,400, with industry watchers expecting the total to hit 10,000 over the next five years. Even craft pioneer Sam Adams is struggling against the rapid proliferation of small batch local brands. This is good news for beer aficionados and also for economic developers (more on that later).