In a year that saw a drop in overall U.S. beer sales, craft breweries rose to the challenge and saw a booming year. Beer sales dropped in the United States by about 5 million barrels in 2009. According to the Brewers Association however, Craft Brewers saw a 7.2 percent growth in volume, equaling almost 614,000 barrels.

“Beer lovers continue to find great value and enjoyment in fuller flavored craft beers,” said Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association. “Americans have an increasing appreciation of craft beers, and the growing number of brewers behind them. They’re eager to try the latest seasonal release and to sample a variety of beers from different breweries.”

There is a nice article over at Beer Advocate with some more statistics about craft beer and beer in general. Check it out!

Before launching BarBEERians.com, we spent a while thinking of catchy domain names people would remember, but craftbeer.com never crossed our mind, even though it is an obvious choice for a beer related website. Luckily, it wasn’t just sitting there unused. Unknown to most of us, the Brewers Association had been working on developing it into a website about craft beer, who would have guessed? For the decade long history of the domain name, there is a brief article on beernews.org.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play around on the site yet, but it seems to have some interesting feature and a nice design. Although it doesn’t appear to have daily content updates yet, it does promise to be a great resource for beer drinkers. Perhaps we’ll get some input from Steffen on what he thinks, being as he is our resident expert on the interweb.