Why — why? — would you open a craft brewery in the Bay Area right now?

The market is saturated. Doing business here is expensive. The ever-inflating Anheuser-Busch behemoth is making business more difficult for everyone. No one cares about your hazy grapefruit magnum opus IPA. Aren’t we — and really I’m just parroting a phrase here that everyone in San Francisco seems to love throwing around — in a bubble?

And yet. Turns out, despite what fear-mongering headlines you may have read, craft beer in America shows no signs of bubble-bursting overall. And the Bay Area in particular is in an especially rich moment for craft beer — one in which demand is strong, quality is high and innovation is a given.

But our beer scene is also in a moment of transition, and the newcomers are not following the same path that their forebears did.

Look, for example, at Barebottle, which opened in Bernal Heights in mid-July. In those seven months, it’s gone from four employees to 18. The beer is sold to 140 outside draft accounts. On weekends and Friday nights, its 3,000-square-foot taproom is often standing-room-only.

“In all of our financial projections, we’re well ahead of where we thought we’d be,” says Lester Koga, who handles Barebottle’s operations and sales. “It’s pretty far surpassing our initial plans.”

Or Fieldwork in Berkeley, so deeply entrenched in our craft-beer identity now that it seems to have been around for years. It opened in 2015. In its first year, it sold about 2,700 barrels of beer; in 2016, 10,000 barrels. It projects 16,000 for 2017. It has three taprooms now (Berkeley, Sacramento and Napa), and is opening two more (Monterey, San Mateo).

Business is brisk, but business is also different from what it used to be. Unlike an earlier generation of breweries, for whom national household-name status was a more obvious goal — the Lagunitas, Bear Republic, 21st Amendment set — these new Bay Area breweries claim to have no ambition to distribute nationally.

Their focus is on their own taprooms, where they can get the best sales margins. While Anheuser-Busch tries to elbow independent breweries out of national distribution networks, these new Bay Area breweries opt to self-distribute, extending their nexus only to nearby bars. They’d prefer to keep it local, anyway, because that way they ensure fresh beer.

(A number of longer-established San Francisco breweries have followed this model. Magnolia, opened in 1997, has always distributed most of its beer locally, and ThirstyBear, established 1996, is as much a tapas joint as a production brewery.)

Sure, the city is one of the hardest places in the country to open a small business. “But there’s no better market to be in than San Francisco,” Koga says.

Nationally, craft beer growth is slowing, but that fact alone does not portend a burst bubble. Rather, it’s a sign of industry maturation. “It’s normal market dynamics,” says Bart Watson, chief economist for the Brewer’s Association. With over 5,000 breweries nationwide, some will surely shake out, but he points out: “Name an industry where everyone stays in business.” Besides, for now, openings still outpace closings.

“For the last five years, we’ve been in a unique position where everyone succeeded,” Watson says. “There was a huge surge in demand for full-flavored products from independent breweries. People have gotten spoiled. That was the anomaly.”

In a place like the Bay Area, where craft already holds about a 30 percent market share of overall beer sales, “it’s harder to move the needle,” Watson says. Twenty-two of the city’s 35 operating breweries opened in the last five years. If the market grows at a normal rate, it will look slow compared to that rapid-fire surge.

Yet one aspect of brewery growth shows no signs of slowing, even on a national level: on-premise sales — which means taprooms and bars, not retail. Watson’s numbers show that on-premise beer production was up 62 percent in mid-2016 over the previous year. Which means that, to the extent that our craft breweries depend on taproom and local bar sales rather than getting their six-packs stocked at every 7-Eleven in the nation, they look to be on a healthy track.

Pursuing this model might involve opening many taprooms, as Fieldwork and Woods Beer Co. have done. It might mean focusing on one taproom and many local bar accounts, as Barebottle is doing.

Or it may mean not wanting to grow very much at all, as is the case for Cellarmaker.

“Expanding production is not our focus,” says Connor Casey, one of Cellarmaker’s founders. “On-premise taproom sales are our No. 1 priority.”

That’s an ideological preference, on some level — small breweries like interacting with their customers, and Cellarmaker is particularly famous for serving its beers ultra-fresh — but it’s also a financial consideration. Cellarmaker can make about $200 per keg wholesale, or $700 to $900 if it sells that same keg in its taproom.

“If we hadn’t had a taproom,” Casey says, “we would have closed down after five months.”

Two-thirds of San Francisco’s breweries produce fewer than 1,000 barrels of beer a year, and only two of the city’s breweries (Anchor and 21st Amendment) produce more than 50,000. Cracking the code for the next great IPA suddenly seems a lot simpler when you only have to be the next great IPA in SoMa, or the next great sour in Dogpatch.

In this context, “growth” can almost start to seem like an irrelevant marker of success. “Beer being served at its peak is not scalable,” Casey says, in what may be the ultimate expression of the microbrewery ethos.

OK, enough with the numbers. What does this new generation of Bay Area beer really look like — or rather, what does it taste like?

They’re specialists — at least the most successful ones are. They are perfecters of style, often staking a reputation on a particular kind of beer while eschewing the idea of a “flagship” product. Cellarmaker, though known for its hoppy IPAs, makes a different beer every week; Fieldwork, in its two years of existence, has released 130 different recipes. Scroll through the Rare Barrel’s bottle label archives and you’ll see their annals of idiosyncratic sours.

“The reputation is more important than it used to be,” says Craig Wathen of City Beer Store. “People know that if the brewery’s good, even if they’ve never heard of the beer, it’s worth seeking out.”

And there’s a lot worth seeking out. “For a long time, San Diego was where the innovation was,” Wathen says. “Now, especially the last two years, it’s here.”

“I could do three lists, with no overlap, and I still wouldn’t get to stock all the great beer that’s here,” says Christian Albertson of Monk’s Kettle in the Mission. “I used to always have Stone Pale Ale on tap, but we haven’t had it in seven years. Sante Adairius, HenHouse, Cellarmaker — they changed the game.”

There are also plenty of missteps among our breweries right now, some systemic. (Just ask Maggie Hoffman, page L8.) The popularity of sour beers has led to far too many kettle sours — shortcut lactobacillus inoculations that don’t get the essential influence of barrel aging. Personally, I can’t stand them. And in the race to stand out, too many of our breweries resort to bizarre flavor additives that don’t harmonize into a complete whole. The toasted coconut lagers, the Mexican chocolate white stouts, the deliberately oxidative pilsners — it doesn’t always work.

At the same time, Bay Area breweries are putting original and genuinely delightful new spins on old tricks. We’re putting our own stamp on the New England-style IPA, a tropical-inflected style most closely associated with Vermont’s the Alchemist. And our breweries are pioneering new standards for freshness, with drink-by dates, requirements that bars tap their kegs within a couple of days and — best way of all — by urging customers to come get their beer at the source.

Ultimately, people just seem to like beer more than they used to. Whatever the stats say, “there’s no change in how it’s growing from a consumer-appreciation perspective,” says Fieldwork co-founder Barry Braden.

“People who have grown up drinking craft here — they’re not going back.”

Esther Mobley is The Chronicle’s wine, beer and spirits writer. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley

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The most exciting Bay Area breweries to open in 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Barebottle Brewery (S.F.)

Black Hammer Brewing (S.F.)

Fieldwork Brewing Co. (Berkeley)

Fort Point Beer Co. (S.F.)

Laughing Monk Brewing (S.F.)

The Rare Barrel (Berkeley)

Shady Oak Barrel House (Santa Rosa)

Temescal Brewing (Oakland)