idea of the week

As of March, the United States was home to nearly two thousand four hundred craft breweries, the small producers best known for India pale ales and other decidedly non-Budweiser-esque beers. What’s more, they are rapidly colonizing what one might call the craft-beer frontier: the South, the Southwest, and, really, almost any part of the country that isn’t the West or the Northeast. The interactive map below, based on newly released 2012 data gathered by the Brewers Association, illustrates this phenomenon and offers a detailed overview of the American craft-beer industry.