As of March, the United States was home to two thousand three hundred and sixty craft breweries, the relatively small, artisanship-oriented producers best known for India pale ales, porters, and other decidedly non-Budweiser-esque beers. These beverages have become so popular that craft beer now represents thirty per cent of Costco’s beer sales, and this past August the White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked whether Obama would be releasing the recipe for his honey ale. He responded, joking, “I’m not aware of any plans at this time to… divulge the secret recipes.” (The formula became public several days later.)

But such statistics and anecdotes fail to communicate a fascinating aspect of the craft-beer boom. The beverage is colonizing what one might call the craft-beer frontier: the parts of the country that are far from the major craft breweries of the West Coast and the Northeast.

The New Yorker’s new interactive map both illustrates this phenomenon and offers a more general overview of the American craft-beer industry. (Click on either image to open.) It is based on newly released 2012 data gathered by the Brewers Association, ranging from total craft breweries per state to individual brewery growth rates. One way to see the spread of craft brewing from the West and Northeast to the South, and from the coasts to the country’s interior, is to compare the map of over-all production per state to the map of per-cent change in production from 2011 to 2012. Or toggle between the fifty largest craft breweries and the fifty that are growing the fastest.

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Some of the map’s highlights:

Even as production remains concentrated in traditional craft-beer regions, it is surging in the South and elsewhere. The pioneering “microbreweries” of the seventies and eighties—among them Anchor Brewing, New Albion Brewing, Sierra Nevada Brewing, and the Boston Beer Company—were mostly founded in California and New England. Current trends reflect this history: twenty-seven of the country’s fifty largest craft breweries are located in California, Oregon, New England, or the Mid-Atlantic (with eleven in the Golden State alone). Five of the remaining twenty-three are in Colorado—the same number that can be found in the entirety of the former Confederacy. (If you switch to the “breweries per 500,000 people” view, it becomes clear that per-capita craft-brewery density in the South is the lowest in the country.) But from 2011 to 2012, annual production grew faster in the South than just about anywhere else, with the fastest-growing producers including Alabama (first out of all fifty states), Tennessee (fifth), Florida (seventh), and Kentucky (eighth). Other rapidly growing producers include Minnesota, Nevada, and Oklahoma.

Many of the fastest-growing craft breweries are those that are pushing into less saturated areas—and they are growing really quickly. A number of the breweries noted on the “fastest-growing” map hail from California—notably Lagunitas, Green Flash, Ballast Point, and AleSmith, perhaps because of nationwide demand for their hoppy, West Coast-style India pale ales. Still, the three breweries that grew fastest from 2011 to 2012 were Tennessee’s Blackstone Brewery (by 1,190%) and Texas’s Karbach Brewing (1,112%) and Austin Beerworks (394%). (The map does not display many smaller breweries that grew at even faster rates: our five-thousand-barrel cutoff helps control for the fact that the rapid growth of a newborn brewery, like that of a human infant, often has more to do with its natural lifecycle than anything else.) The brewery that grew fourth-fastest, Golden Road, is notable in that it is the only major brewery in Los Angeles, which, in terms of craft beer, has a reputation as the Death Valley to San Diego and Northern California’s fertile fields. Number five, DC Brau, has filled a niche in the District of Columbia, which until it opened, in 2011, had no production breweries (though it did have a handful of brewpubs, restaurants that brew their own beer). By the end of 2013, it will likely have five or more.

All but two states brewed more craft beer in 2012 than in 2011. It’s common for the Brewers Association to tout nationwide statistics that demonstrate the continued rise of craft beer—for example, the fact that the United States contained three hundred and seventy-seven more craft breweries in 2012 than 2011, an increase of about nineteen per cent. But the fact that production is up state by state is probably even more impressive. The two outliers, too, are intriguing: North Dakota and Vermont. The former, where production fell by nearly ten per cent despite an ongoing oil-fuelled economic boom, may serve as a cautionary tale: onerous licensing and distribution policies, as well as production maximums, have historically made the state what one beer entrepreneur, in a 2010 article in the Bismarck Tribune, called “a dead zone for craft brewing.” The case of Vermont, though, is more surprising, since the state has the most craft breweries per capita of any in the country, twenty per five hundred thousand people. It suggests that perhaps the state is hitting its saturation point—that states, like people, can eventually have enough beer.

Read the previous installments of Idea of the Week.

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Infographic by Larry Buchanan and Daniel Fromson.