Beer Golden Age Infographic

William Bostwick and Jessi Rymill, co-authors of Craft Beer, posted an interesting infographic in Co.Design on Friday confirming that we are indeed in a golden age of beer. Some interesting tidbits:

• Outside of the Prohibition period, 1978 marked the lowest number of American breweries (44) since around 1810.
• In ~30 years since, we've added 1551 breweries in that time.
• The peak in 1873 (4,131), although it seems unlikely that we'll ever hit that number again, given that there were likely a lot of breweries because many of them were small and didn't have the distribution channels we have now. Output was tiny (under 12 million barrels).
• Today's breweries output about 200 million barrels annually. That number has stayed static since the 1980s, but a higher proportion of that number each year is coming from small craft brewers.

(thanks to Jonathan for the link)