There’s a great moment in Steve Hindy’s shaggy little history of the craft beer industry, “The Craft Beer Revolution,” in which Jim Koch, the sharp-elbowed maker of Samuel Adams, loses his temper at the author, himself a brewer of note. It comes after a 1993 industry meeting in which Mr. Hindy and others circulated a petition that questioned Mr. Koch’s marketing claims. As Mr. Hindy describes it, Mr. Koch accuses him of trying to subvert his business, shouting at him over and over and using far more colorful language than I am allowed to relate here.

Were there more moments like this, “The Craft Beer Revolution” might be a more entertaining book. Alas, Mr. Hindy, a co-founder of the Brooklyn Brewery, is either too amiable or too diplomatic to shovel much more dirt on his peers than that. And this makes his book, while a pleasant-enough survey of his growing industry, less flavorful than it might otherwise have been.

Which is a shame, because the rise of what are sometimes called microbreweries makes for a pretty good success story. At a time when overall beer consumption is in decline — a result of stiffer enforcement of drunken driving laws, Mr. Hindy speculates — craft beers have sprung from nowhere during the last 30 years to command 10 percent of the American beer market. (Defining the term “craft beer,” it should be noted, is a source of some controversy; in general, think of it as small, local and, for many companies, unprofitable.)

The story of craft beer’s rise begins in 1965, when Fritz Maytag, an heir to the Maytag appliance fortune, bought and revived the Anchor Steam brewery in San Francisco, thus inspiring a generation of so-called home brewers to begin considering commercial ventures. Some had sampled ales and dark beers while traveling or working in Europe, and wanted to bring these strange new flavors to America, whose mainstream beers were, and largely remain, pale lagers. Other pioneers were tinkerers who became fascinated with the home beer-making kits that spread during the 1970s.