If Robin Ottaway, sales manager and co-owner of the Brooklyn Brewery, wants to know how popular his company's beer is, he need only check his e-mail. In his inbox last month were requests from interested parties in Costa Rica, Panama and India asking how to get Brooklyn's brews (already sold in China, Turkey and Finland, among other countries).

"Just people inquiring about our beer," he says. "We have a pretty well-established international market."

Indie "craft" beer makers such as Brooklyn Brewery are where the action is these days. American craft brewers are small (producing fewer than 2 million barrels annually), independent (not controlled by an industrial brewery such as Anheuser-Busch) and traditional (using at least 50% all-malt ingredients in their beers). And their success is striking fear into the mass-market brewers who dominate the $97 billion U.S. beer industry. Read more...