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Things were happening on the East Coast, too. Jim Koch — after brewing the first batch of Sam Adams in his Jamaica Plain kitchen, then walking bar to bar with cold ones in his briefcase to make the sale to skeptical publicans — opened the Boston Beer Company in 1984. In 1986, D.L. Geary Brewing, in Portland, Maine, unveiled its flagship pale ale. Boston’s Harpoon Brewery churned out its first batches the same year, as did Catamount Brewery, in Windsor, Vermont. (The latter was bought up by the former in 2000.)

Their success came thanks to a simple fact. "People who tasted [the beer] liked it. They were tasting it close to where it was made. It was fresh, and it was good," says Yenne. "There was a pent-up demand. It’s just a great idea, so it was able to spread rapidly across the country."

And so it did, through the mid 1990s, after which point the industry had become so crowded that the inevitable market correction came. "What you saw in the ’90s was a lot of consolidation," Yenne says. "A lot of the poorly run brewpubs and microbreweries that had come along in the ’80s and early ’90s went away. And others, like Sierra Nevada and Boston Beer Company, grew at tremendous rates." Indeed, Boston Beer Company and Sierra Nevada currently rank in the top 10, sales-wise, of American commercial brewers. "[These days], I like to call it the ‘craft brew’ movement, rather than calling them microbrews," Yenne says. "They’re not exactly ‘micro’ anymore."

Their massive success built appetite and inspired others, as countless breweries have sprung up in their wake. From the days when there were barely 40 breweries in 50 states, the US now has more breweries than any other country in the world. "You can go into a brewpub — in Massachusetts or North Carolina or Colorado or Montana — and see a whole range of things. Order the sampler, you’ll get not only a rainbow of colors set on the table in front of you, but a really incredible spectrum of flavors, which was literally unheard-of anywhere in the country in 1980."

Still, Yenne says, "with a craft-brew business, I think it has now reached a point of saturation. Virtually every town in the country that’s going to have a craft brewery has one. If you look at the statistics, you don’t see growth in this sector, in terms of volume, anymore. It grew to a certain point, and has more or less topped out. For instance, Sierra Nevada is not going to grow 1500 percent in the first decade of the 21st century like it did in the ’90s."

But that hardly means the industry is moribund. Indeed, in terms of product, things are more exciting than ever. Craft brewers from all over are experimenting, rolling out new product lines, getting adventuresome. The early years primarily found breweries in the Northeast sticking to classic-English-ale styles, while Northwestern brewers used locally grown hops for their big-flavored, bitter beers. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to see a Doppelbock or a Baltic porter, a braggot or an imperial stout, a Kölsch or a cream ale, at your local liquor store.

Or at a place like the Sunset Grill & Tap, in Allston. "I don’t want to be cocky or conceited, but I’d like to think that we were kind of the ones who really started the microbrew thing back in 1987, when the word ‘microbrew’ didn’t have much of a meaning to anyone," says Sunset owner Mark Kadish. "At the time, there really weren’t very many, and we kind of specialized in carrying American microbrews only. We didn’t have any imports. And at the time we may have had 30, which was a huge selection. Now, of course, we have 112 taps and 350 different bottles. And a lot of the microbrews have really grown up — Sam Adams lager might as well be as big as Coca-Cola, these days. But [Sam Adams] also does these small-batch interesting beers like chocolate bock, Rauchbier, cherry wheat, cream stout. Those are more local and interesting, and, in my mind, microbrews."

What’s more, Kadish thinks many US craft brewers have even improved on the styles pioneered by their European forebears. In the dark days before the microbrew revolution, beer would "come over on a boat sometimes, and God knows how it’s handled, and it could have been sitting on a dock, and the distributor could have kept it in the warehouse unrefrigerated, and by the time the consumer gets it, after its being in a walk-in fridge with a fluorescent light, it’s horrible." But when American brewers started trying their hands at similar styles, "whether it was a German wheat beer or an IPA from England, [they] made them nice and fresh and local. Local, fresh beer is definitely the way to go."

Chris Bol, the beer guru at Redbones, in Davis Square, the barbecue joint whose 24 taps rotate constantly among some of the best craft brews in the country, points out that the market is so robust these day, the choices so varied, that he can keep the draughts flowing with enough fine ales and lagers — not all of them American, but most — to satisfy two different crowds. For one thing, he looks for "beers that are easily accessible, that customers who might not know a lot about craft brews, who drink macro lagers, can appreciate too." But he’s also got stuff for the hard-core beer nerds. "Well-crafted, hard-to-find beers. The more rare, the better," he says. "I put a lot of time and effort into finding things that no one else has."

Before long, Bol says, some of the former customers evolve into the latter. "A lot of people come here, and they don’t really know a lot about microbrews, and they’ll ask some questions, and we’ll give them some suggestions, and they’ll try a beer here for the first time. Then they’ll come in a week later, ‘Oh, I had this beer here for the first time, and I really loved it.’ Unfortunately, we have a rotating tap selection, so they come back again and it’s not on!"

New England, after all, is the quintessential beer-drinker’s haven. "The winters are cold, the summers are hot. In the hot summer you want an ice-cold beer, and during the winter you want a beer to warm you up." The only problem, as far as Bol is concerned, is that despite the multitude of beers purveyed by places like Sunset, Redbones, and Bukowski Tavern, there aren’t enough establishments dedicated to serving craft brews. "Someone asked me if it’s a competition between us and the other beer bars. It really isn’t. The more places serve good beer, the more people will be into it, and the better it is for all of us."

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com.