Summit Brewing Co. will start selling its beer in Arkansas next month. The move tops off an extensive year of growth by the St. Paul-based company whose president still sees plenty of room for growth at home to fill a newly expanded site, even with an explosion of the craft brewing industry.

“We don’t add states very frequently,” said Summit President Mark Stutrud. “But this is no indicator that we’re on some national acquisition campaign.”

Summit is sold in 17 states but 89 percent of the 122,517 barrels of beer it produced last year sold in Minnesota. More than three-quarters of that sold in the Twin Cities.

Summit finished a 7,600-square-foot addition to its main St. Paul brewery at 910 Montreal last September. Then it purchased the 40,000-square-foot industrial building next door to consolidate some 10,000 square feet of leased warehouse space, meet existing office needs and add brewing capacity — including a line of canned beer — for its growing business.

The company plans to add eight new full-time positions and up to 16 part-timers by the end of this year. Summit beer currently employs 62 people full time.

Summit’s hiring is part of a jump in brewery employees statewide from 250 in 2004 to 512 in 2013, according to an analysis by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.

DEED also counts 65 regional breweries in Minnesota in 2013, up from 57 the year before and just 26 in 2004. The amount of beer produced in the state in 10 years grew 83 percent. Average pay for brewery workers is around $17.50 an hour.

There is still no sign of the craft brewing industry going flat in the Twin Cities any time soon if measured against more mature markets like Denver, Portland and San Diego.

“Quality will be the key going forward as consumers are more educated than ever on beer,” said Bart Watson, staff economist with the Boulder, Colo.-based Brewers Association. “So the numbers of breweries isn’t that important if most are focused on serving their local area.” Watson said the number of small breweries a city can absorb appears to be high.

Brooklyn Center-based Surly Brewing broke ground in the fall on its $20 million “destination brewery“ at 3171 Fifth St. SE in Minneapolis’ Prospect Park neighborhood. Company leaders say they will employ as many as 200 workers by the end of this year at the 50,000-square-foot brewery and pub. Surly’s founder Omar Ansari is credited with driving the change in state law to allow breweries to sell draft beer on site, opening the door for the flood of brewpub developments.

On a smaller scale than Summit and Surly, Indeed Brewing is expanding its capacity just 16 months after opening its brew house at 711 15th Ave. NE in Minneapolis. The facility went from selling 900 barrels the first year to 5,400 barrels in 2013. Preliminary forecasts call for more than doubling that amount this year. The growth, said Indeed President Nathan Berndt, is not necessarily because people are drinking more beer.

“There’s a thirst for craft beer and there just wasn’t enough local product to go around,” Berndt said. He envisions breweries serving neighborhoods “much like it was 100 years ago in Minnesota.”

There is considerable competition for high-quality Minnesota-made beer, he said, but the growth market comes from people looking to branch out from mass-produced products from giants like Anheuser-Busch, based in St. Louis.

Correction: The original version of this story contained several errors including Summit’s barrel output in 2013, the square feet of its 2013 expansion and a new building it acquired, the number of full-time employees and how many employees will be hired in 2014. The story has been updated with the correct information.