Mike Wright orders a Blue Foot Flanders Red-style ale, a slightly sweet and sour beer with notes of cherries aged in a Pinot Noir barrel. It’s his first time trying the beer despite the fact that he brewed it. The woman behind the bar who brings it to him is oblivious to this detail, despite the fact that Mike is on a bar stool in Southeast Portland at Victory Bar, one of Beetje Brewing’s half-dozen accounts, and it’s five blocks from his house.

The definition of nano is that it’s one billionth the size of something, so there are a billion nanometers in one meter. In regards to nanobreweries, the definition takes some liberties, but not many. Compare, for example, Beetje to Budweiser. Anheuser-Busch brewed roughly 100 million barrels of beer in the US alone in 2010. Beetje made and sold less than five.

Small time, under capitalized enterprises driven more by passions than profits—the kind where the CEO is the one sweeping the broom at the end of the day—are the very reasons it’s become fun to eat and drink again. Whether it’s topping crackers with some strawberry-basil-pinot jam made by a homesteader gone pro or drinking pints of Daddy’s Chocolate Milk Stout in the very basement of the artisan who brewed the beer, the realm of food and drink continues to expand by way of shrinking the scale of production. Homogenized goods on supermarket shelves continue to give way to culinary delights found only at outlets such as farmers markets and, in the way of suds, adventurous neighborhood ale houses willing to tap offerings from neighboring nanobreweries.

This renaissance is no longer new nor is it proprietary to one state or region of the country. But it’s still driven by craft. It isn’t, and can’t, be realistically driven by anything else.

Nanobreweries are indeed federally licensed breweries. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be legal to sell their beer. But the equipment their beer is brewed on is, in many cases, the very same systems that the brewmasters worked with while simply tinkering in backyards, albeit several steps above introductory homebrewing kits. Oxymoronically, nanobrewers are like professional-homebrewers who sometimes don’t have to leave their own garage; such is the case with Wright’s Beetje. The name, incidentally, inspired both by his Flemish wife and the Belgian beer styles he makes, means “Little bit.” Unsurprisingly, start-up costs for a new brewpub are higher than those of a restaurant. But the cost of launching a nanobrewery fairly resembles that of the beloved foodcarts driving the crafty comfort food industry.

And just like how food carts tend to pop up in places with a lot of great restaurants, making the cooking world an even tougher nut to crack, nanobreweries are more readily found where giant-by-comparison-sized microbreweries already have solid footing. Portland, Oregon boasts seven. The San Francisco Bay Area has or will see nine in operation, all of which poured their wares at the “Brewers of Tomorrow” event during the last SF Beer Week. Half of the nanobreweries in the state of New York are in the greater NYC metro. And San Diego County, beer-famous for its 35 craft breweries, is home to four nanos, the first of which was Hess Brewing.

Founded by Michael Hess and run with the help of his wife, Lynda, and two others, Michael started homebrewing some 15 years ago, before San Diego had anything close to resembling the beer scene it enjoys today. As some of the breweries enjoy tremendous growth—Stone Brewing is opening a second brewery in Europe—Hess’s goal is to remain miniscule. One of the best elements of the Hess Brewing blog (hessbrewing.blogspot.com) is that it lists every nanobrewery they know of, which is over 60 already licensed and operating and nearly 50 in the planning phase.At the Brewers Association, employee Erin Glass has added to her title of Membership Coordinator to include Brewery Detective. Even she uses the Hess blog as a resource. She says she found a guy “who owns a construction/snow removal business that decided to add a brewery to the mix.”

One of the NYC area’s nanos is the Blind Bat Brewery in Centerport on Long Island, still a good 40 miles outside Brooklyn. Paul Dlugokencky started homebrewing mainly because he couldn’t find the kinds of beers he liked to drink. Isn’t that the main reason anyone crafts something on his or her own? If you want something done right, DIY. Paul apparently likes smoked beers, typical of Bamberg, Germany, where Rauchbiers (Rauch means smoke) reign. Of his three beers brewed with smoked malt or smoked wheat, he may have been the first to commercially resurrect a Grodziskie, a smoked wheat beer previously lost to the annals of Polish brewing history. It’d be damn near impossible to call him a trendsetter, but two Portland brewpubs have since tapped Gratzers (the German name for the style).

Blind Bat’s brewing system recently expanded nine-fold. Paul went from a ten-gallon system to a three-barrel one (30 gallons each). Paul writes “If the beers are received well enough, then I’d like to expand the brewery (and, of course, quit the ‘day job’). With the economy as it is, however, it will likely remain a part-time smaller-than-small operation for a while.”

Beer fans are no doubt familiar with Dogfish Head Brewing, which owner Sam Calagione started on a similar 10-gallon system. His brewery now cranks out what is still small-batch beer, but on a 75-barrel system, and Sam briefly hosted his own reality show on the Discovery Channel.

“I didn’t have any lofty goals of being the next Deschutes or Widmer,” Mike Wright says, which is a good thing since his output is a veritable drop in the barrel, comparatively. In fact, while he’s now a pro brewer according to the OLCC, he can’t quit his day job. But he’d like to. “I think every nanobrewer would like to do this full time.”

Asked if Beetje will join the statistic of failed breweries, he says stoically, “That means that I lost a bunch of savings. I gave it a shot. It didn’t fly.” Not every brewery succeeds. No numbers are available for any nanobreweries that have already opened and closed. But it’s safe to guess that they will. And when they do, the brewmasters will go back to being homebrewers. Because at the end of the day, making beer is all about the craft.