Four Bold BEERS of the West — and One Scrumptious CIDER

Back in American beer’s medieval period (the late 1970s), fewer than 90 breweries owned by just 42 companies were producing mainly run-of-the-mill suds to an oblivious but parched nation.

Only the most clairvoyant beer geeks would have predicted today’s craft hyper-renaissance, which has resulted in more than 7,000 breweries from coast to coast — 150 in Denver alone — and about 98 percent of them small, independent craft brewers obsessed with turning a once dull national beer industry into a hopped-up landscape of world-renowned ales of all shades and overachieving lagers now treated with the