A couple of times recently I’ve read stories — or, yikes, tweets — that mentioned how many brewing companies remained in operation in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, then reported the current number of breweries. That’s not exactly apples to apples. Many brewing concerns operate multiple breweries, and the proper comparison would be breweries to breweries and concerns to concerns.

So, for the record, here are a few useful numbers to remember.

The boom years for breweries
(From History of the Brewing Industry and Brewing Science in America, by John P. Arnold and Frank Penman)

The number of breweries never reached the 1878 level again, drifting below 2,000 by 1892 and to 1,092 in 1918, the year before Prohibition began. However, overall production went straight up , to 20,710,933 in 1886, to 30,487,209 five years later, passing 40 million barrels in 1901, 54 million in 1906 and 63 million by 1911.

Many of those breweries operating in 1878 were quite small. BEER, Its History And Its Economic Value As A National Beverage, by F.W. Salem, provides a complete list of production numbers for 1878 and 1879. Thus we can see that G. P. Pfannebecker in Paterson, N.J., brewed 48 barrels in 1878 and 152 in 1879. The biggest dozen breweries in 1879 where:

Before the renaissance
(From American Breweries II by Dale P. Van Wieren)

1983 – 51 brewing concerns operate 80 breweries. This is the low water mark for number of breweries.
1984 – 44 brewing concerns operate 83 breweries.

19th century startup
(As long as I’m digging through history books, some facts from 100 Years of Brewing, published in 1903)

More than 100 years before Sierra Nevada launched in California, Adolphus Busch bought an interest in a St. Louis brewery owned by Eberhard Anheuser. A brewery had been operating at the same location for 15 years, yet in 1865 sold a modest 8,000 barrels. By the time the name was changed to Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association in 1875 annual production has risen to 34,797.

In the next 10 years production increased by 10%, 48%, 32%, 41%, 34%, 42%, 22%, 22%, and 5% before falling 1% to reach 318,085 barrels. Sixteen years later sales passed 1 million for the first time.

That year, 1901, the plant covered about 60 acres and as well as a brewhouse that could produce 6,000 barrels a day, it had ice plants with 650 tons daily capacity, malt houses with 4,500 bushels daily capacity, a cooling capacity of 2,650 tons per day, storage elevators for malt and barley of 1.25 million bushels capacity, stock houses for lagering purposes of 400,000 barrels capacity, and a power plant with 60,000 square feet of heating surface (equal to 7,750 horse power).

So the story behind the taster tray and the Bent Nail IPA at Red Lodge Ales in the Montana town of the same name is the same.

The beer was named as a tribute to the construction workers who were among the brewery’s first customers. “They said it (the beer) made for a lot of bent nails,” a bartender explained. It’s a solid beer, nicely balanced, worthy of the bronze medal it won at the 2007 Great American Beer Festival (as an American-style Strong Pale Ale).

The handle for the taster tray features the same bent nail. Easy to carry and nicely decorated. Customers use the green sheet, on the left, to order, writing numbers next to the beer name on the laminated menu with a grease pencil. Very efficient.

Broken Nail Double IPA was not available when we visited. My nephew, whose wedding we headed north to attend, assures me it’s worth returning for. We must may.

In the front matter of his new book, Great American Craft Beer: A Guide to the Nation’s Finest Beers and Breweries, Andy Crouch revisits the never-ending discussion about “What the heck is craft beer anyway?” If you’ve followed this online, including at Crouch’s blog, this won’t be new.

That he notes it is (at least in part) an “existential debate” seems relevant to a guest post this week at WashingtonCityPaper.com. Greg Engert, the beer director for the Neighborhood Restaurant Group, which includes ChurchKey and Birch & Barley, writes that “Craft Brewing Faces an Identity Crisis.”

The debates that continue to arise as to what craft brewing is are inevitable and often interesting. What I find more interesting is the need for craft beer drinkers, myself included, to pin this down, to specifically signify when identifying something as craft-brewed. And these debates always seem to intensify in the face of further complexity, as if craft beer drinkers need to maintain a sort of ownership and authority over a product that is becoming harder and harder to identify by definition. Perhaps even more importantly, the industry is becoming more complex and more difficult to understand and define just as it is also becoming more popular and—dare I say it?—mainstream.

Engert concludes, “In the end, debates about what craft beer is may in actuality be a burgeoning debate about who craft beer may be.”

Existentialists, have at it.