This is no sure bet for Brooklyn Brewery. Beer consumption in France is Europe’s second-lowest, after Italy; only 16 percent of French drinkers choose beer. With nearly two-thirds preferring wine, French consumers have proved so unfriendly in the past that few American craft brewers have bothered to cross the ocean. The only American beer that has caught on to any extent is Bud, largely by dint of the distributive heft of its multinational parent, Anheuser-Busch InBev.

“France is a difficult nut to crack,” said Simon Spillane, senior adviser of the Brussels-based Brewers of Europe, which tracks beer consumption by country. Added to the brewer’s challenge is the 160 percent increase in the French beer tax that took effect Jan. 1, which is projected to raise the price of a typical half-pint of beer by 20 to 30 centimes, the equivalent of 27 to 40 cents.

And yet, among younger French men and women there are signs of changing tastes. While consumption of all alcoholic beverages in France has been dropping for 30 years, beer is nonetheless an industry with annual sales of 2 billion euros, or $2.7 billion. And even as overall beer sales in France fell 1.7 percent in 2010, the most recent year for which data are available, specialty beer sales jumped 8.8 percent, according to the French Brewers’ Association.

Craft brewers, an American category for independent breweries producing fewer than six million barrels a year, and smaller microbreweries have been popping up across France. Numerically, they are the vast majority of the approximately 500 brewers now operating in the country, although their sales make up only 2 percent in a market dominated by Carlsberg, Heineken and Anheuser-Busch InBev.

“People are drinking less, but they want something that’s good,” said Simon Thillou, a former journalist who in 2006, tired of the usual “tasteless beer,” opened La Cave à Bulles, a specialty shop in the Marais section of Paris. The shop sells 250 craft and microbrews, now including Brooklyn Brewery’s.