“We have a lot of runway in front of us,” said Mr. Fish, whose company brought in just under $100 million in 2014. “We’re happy managing growth around the 10 percent mark.”

To bring in new capital without taking on investors looking for an ultimate sale of the company, one path is to offer employees an ownership stake. That is how Mr. Doyle cashed out at Harpoon. And Mr. Fish has instituted a similar employee stock ownership plan at Deschutes, taking on debt to buy out partners and then distributing their shares to employees.

“The ESOP has become a popular solution to cash out a founder or some owners and you’re not selling to Anheuser-Busch or Coors,” said Benj Steinman, president of the industry journal Beer Marketer’s Insights. “But it creates its own set of questions. How does the company move forward? Can it do so under ESOP structure as well as with founders with a strong vision? And debt is a whole other level of consideration.”

For other brewers, the way to grow is to bring in outside money and expertise. One is Will Hamill, who has spent 22 years building Uinta into a craft brewery with a 144,000-barrel annual capacity. Even after a recent $18 million investment, projected growth of 30 to 35 percent this year would put the brewery again at its capacity limit. He wondered if the business needed more than his skills.

“I’ve always grown organically and reinvested in the brewery,” Mr. Hamill said. “I’ve been doing it all on my own and I owed a lot of money. I’m O.K. with that, but I’m looking at another $10 million in investment. I was looking to give Uinta the growth it deserved and not hold it back..”

So Mr. Hamill took an investment from Riverside, which offered capital for growth as well as a payout for the shareholders. Steve Rice, Riverside’s vice president, says his firm saw an owner who had brought the company a long way but needed a boost.

“Going from zero to 50,000 barrels requires branding, strong culture and great distributors, and this can be accomplished by a special entrepreneur with a strong core team,” he said. “But to go from 50,000 to 250,000 and break into the top 10 craft brewers, you have extra infrastructure requirements, and that’s where a partner like Riverside can be helpful.”