The Beer Dance: How Schlafly Craft Beer Shook Up St. Louis

ST. LOUIS (MainStreet) -- Schlafly Brewing Co.'s win against Boston Beer Co.'s(SAM) Samuel Adams in our Beer Dance craft beer bracket last week looked like an upset. But just beneath its head was an outpouring of local pride that's been brewing for quite some time.

Schlafly has grown from an 880-barrel-a-year operation founded in a small St. Louis taproom in 1991 to a 15,000-barrel bottling operation in 2003 to a nearly 50,000-barrel enterprise with two restaurants, almost 50 styles of beer and distribution in 12 states. It doesn't give its beers wacky names -- its Biere De Garde saison and Oktoberfest Marzen seem downright quirky compared to its straightforward Pale Ale and Hefeweizen. Schlafly's production is still well below the nearly 2.5 million barrels of Samuel Adams brewed at facilities in Boston, Allentown, Pa., and Cincinnati, but looks a bit bigger when you compare Schlafly's 16,000 followers on Twitter to Samuel Adams' little more than 8,000.