In once rundown urban districts across the country, craft breweries have helped to transform the neighborhoods around them.
Small business owners tackled the hard work of transforming industrial buildings, many of which had sat empty as demographic changes pulled manufacturers and residents to the suburbs.
Small-time, independent brewers have been one of the beer market's growth drivers. The number of breweries in the U.S. catapulted from 92 in 1980 to 2,514 as of May 2013, according to craft beer trade group Brewers Association. Barrels shipped have more than doubled in the past decade, and craft beer now makes up nearly 7 percent of a U.S. beer market that is growing slowly overall, according to trade publication Beer Marketer's Insights.
As the breweries churned out beer, they drew visitors and eventually new, young residents — and more small businesses.
Here's a look at six breweries whose presence helped to change their surroundings:
DOWNTOWN DIGS: Boulevard Brewing opened in 1989 in its Kansas City, Mo. Westside neighborhood, creating a brewery out of a building that had been a railroad's laundry. While it probably would have been cheaper for the company to be in the suburbs, the brewery's managers are "committed urbanists" who like the idea of contributing to the vitality of the central city as opposed to building on undeveloped land in the suburbs, says Boulevard's CFO, Jeff Crum.
The building's renovation ranged from replacing pipes to cutting out a skylight to make room for tanks. And in order to grow, Boulevard had to buy the land around it from different owners, get approvals from neighbors and get the city to rezone the land around it.
The brewery, at first, struggled to attract visitors, but now draws about 50,000 people annually as the area around it picked up alongside a broader renewal in nearby downtown Kansas City.