As I've written before, even though beer sales have been down in the US, the business of craft beers is doing very well. Here is an article from the Boulder Daily Camera about various aspects of the craft beer market. The author, Aubrey Laurence, notes that overall beer sales were down in the first 6 months of 2009 and that imported beer sales were down 9.5%. But the sales of domestic craft brews was up 5% during the same period.
Not only that, but Laurence writes that there are more breweries in the United States than at any time in the last 100 years. Of course, the US was barreling full tilt towards prohibition 100 years ago. It took 100 years to get back to that point, even though we are nowhere near the breweries-per-capita levels of 100 years ago.
Since many craft brewers started out as homebrewers, we can also thank Congress and Jimmy Carter for passing a law in 1979 that explicitly allowed the brewing of beer in the home for personal use. The feds forgot to add language that allowed beer brewing at home when they repealed prohibition. They allowed for the production of wine, but not beer. Sometimes I wonder if the brewing industry, in terms of the number of brewers and the variety of beers for sale, would have recovered more quickly had the feds specified that homebrewing was legal.
Here is a link to craftbeer.com, a website devoted to craft brewing that Laurence mentions in her article.