The American Craft Beer Revival
By 1978 the United States was down to just 89 breweries, owned by a few dozen companies. They produced, almost without exception, a single style of beer: pale American lager, filtered, pasteurized, and formulated to offend as few drinkers as possible. The craft beer revival that has since produced more than 9,500 operating breweries, hundreds of styles, and a market worth about $28 billion a year is one of the more dramatic reversals in American food history. It began with a handful of people who had tasted something better, often in Europe, and refused to accept that American beer had to stay the way it was.
Fritz Maytag and Anchor Steam
The story commonly starts in 1965 with Fritz Maytag — heir to the appliance company — learning that Anchor Brewing in San Francisco was about to close. He bought a controlling interest and spent the next decade learning to brew, refining the recipes, modernizing the equipment, and building distribution. Anchor Steam Beer, based on a pre-Prohibition hybrid process that ferments lager yeast at ale temperatures in shallow open fermenters, became the first successful American craft beer: distinctive in flavor, bottled in a recognizable shape, and increasingly available in bars that had never stocked anything beyond the national brands.
Maytag's achievement was less technological than commercial and aesthetic. He showed that American drinkers would pay more for a beer that tasted like something, and that independent production could pay its way. Anchor Liberty Ale, first brewed in 1975 and dry-hopped with Cascade, anticipated the pale ale revolution by a decade.
New Albion: The First Modern Craft Brewery
Jack McAuliffe is less famous than Fritz Maytag but arguably more foundational. In 1976 he founded New Albion Brewing in Sonoma, California — the first new American microbrewery since Prohibition. A homebrewer who had discovered British real ale while stationed in Scotland with the Navy, McAuliffe built his brewery largely from scavenged equipment and repurposed dairy components. New Albion made a pale ale, a porter, and a stout in the British tradition, adapted to California ingredients.
New Albion closed in 1982, unable to reach the scale it needed to service its debt. But it proved that a tiny start-up brewery could exist at all, and it became the reference point for the wave of California microbreweries that followed. Jim Koch of the Boston Beer Company has long credited its influence: in 2012 Samuel Adams brewed New Albion Ale again from McAuliffe's original recipe, with McAuliffe himself mashing in the first batch and the profits going to him. McAuliffe died in 2025.
Sierra Nevada and the Pale Ale Template
Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi founded Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in Chico, California in 1979, beginning commercial production in 1980. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale became the template for American craft pale ale: whole-cone Cascade hops added late in the boil for grapefruit-floral aromatics, a firm but balanced malt backbone, 5.6% ABV. Its wide distribution made it the first craft beer many American drinkers encountered, and it established Cascade — a variety you can read more about in our guide to hop varieties — as the default aroma hop of American brewing.
Sierra Nevada remains family-owned and independent, and it now ranks as the second-largest craft brewing company in the country by volume, brewing in Chico and Mills River, North Carolina. Its consistency over more than four decades is an achievement in its own right, and Grossman's habit of building and owning the brewery's infrastructure rather than renting capacity gave it a physical base that competitors could not quickly replicate.
Boston Beer and the Mainstreaming of Craft
Jim Koch founded the Boston Beer Company in 1984 and launched Samuel Adams Boston Lager in 1985, initially contract-brewed at the Pittsburgh Brewing Company. The choice of a lager rather than a pale ale was deliberate: Koch wanted something that would appeal to macro-lager drinkers and work as a gateway beer. Boston Lager, brewed with Hallertau Mittelfrüh and Tettnang noble hops over a base of two-row pale and caramel malt, poured amber and tasted markedly different from Budweiser without being challenging.
The marketing was equally deliberate. Koch positioned Samuel Adams as premium American craft beer — brewed with the "finest ingredients," entered in competitions, and eventually served in its own purpose-designed glass. By the mid-1990s the brand was large enough to face questions about whether it was still "craft." The Brewers Association's debates over how big a craft brewery can be (the cap now sits at six million barrels a year) are partly a product of Sam Adams's ambiguous position.
The Brewers Association and Legal Infrastructure
The homebrewing bill signed by President Carter in 1978 (effective February 1979) was a critical enabling condition for the revival — it let a generation of would-be brewers develop their skills at home before risking commercial capital. The American Homebrewers Association, founded in 1978 by Charlie Papazian, built a community, educational publications, and the National Homebrew Competition, channeling hobbyist passion into commercial ambition.
Papazian's Association of Brewers, which in 2005 merged with the older Brewers' Association of America to form today's Brewers Association, supported the wave of state-level brewpub laws from the mid-1980s onward. Post-Prohibition rules — the legacy covered in our post on Prohibition and the collapse of American brewing — often required complete separation of brewing and retail; the brewpub model needed both under one roof. Loosening those restrictions state by state created the brewpub infrastructure that remains the backbone of local craft brewing.
The 1990s Boom and Bust
The 1990s brought a rapid acceleration of brewery openings. The count of craft breweries passed 1,000 in 1996 — a year with more than 300 openings — and reached about 1,500 by 1999. Then came a shakeout: the total slipped back below 1,500 in 2001 and bottomed out at around 1,400 in 2005, as the market weeded out breweries that had sold mediocre beer on novelty alone. The consolidation was painful but functional: what emerged was a smaller group of more competent producers whose quality could sustain consumer loyalty.
The 2010s Expansion and a New Correction
The second, much larger expansion of craft brewing began around 2010 and ran for more than a decade. Today's 9,500-plus breweries range from the 1,000-barrel neighborhood taproom to regional giants like New Belgium (now owned by Kirin's Lion) and Dogfish Head (merged into Boston Beer in 2019). The style diversification of this period — the IPA explosion, barrel aging, the sour ale movement, the lager revival — restored most of what Prohibition destroyed and added styles the pre-Prohibition industry never contemplated. The boom has now cooled: in both 2024 and 2025 closures outpaced openings, and craft volume has been edging down even as its share of the overall beer market holds steady.
Explore on the map
Sierra Nevada in Chico, Anchor in San Francisco (closed in 2023, bought in 2024 by Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya, and not yet brewing again at the time of writing), and the Boston Beer Company in Boston are the founding monuments of the American craft revival. Explore the United States on the map to trace the geography of American craft brewing from its California and New England origins outward.