Region awash in new wave of niche breweries

Lohring has plenty of company these days. In Framingham, brothers Jack, Eric, and Sam Hendler just produced the first kegs of Jack’s Abby, a line of handcrafted lagers being brewed in a former welding shop. Boston will soon get another home brew of its own, too. Last week, Trillium Brewing Co. was granted a municipal license to begin production at its Congress Street facility, the first step in a process that could have it up and running by early next year.

“It’s almost like the recession caused a wave of Yankee ingenuity,’’ says Bryan Greenhagen, founder of Mystic Brewery in Chelsea, yet another start-up coming online soon. Adds Greenhagen, whose resume includes cofounding an industrial fermentation company: “Everyone is doing a different take on brewing. It’s exciting.’’

To beer specialist Andrew Crouch, author of “Great American Craft Beer,’’ New England is merely catching up with California and other parts of the country already experiencing their own craft beer boomlets. “These aren’t accountants looking for a second career,’’ Crouch says. “They’re social-media savvy, entrepreneurially minded people who are willing to take risks - and who tend to brew more eclectic, experimental beers’’ of limited appeal to mass-market tastes.

This new wave of niche breweries is the most noteworthy since the mid-1990s. Normally, between 100 and 200 breweries start up each year, according to the Colorado-based Brewers Association, an organization representing some 1,760 craft brewers nationally. (A craft brewer is defined as one with an annual production of 6 million barrels or less.) However, the number of craft brewers is up a noteworthy 8 percent since 2009 - and more than 60 percent in the past five years. Sales of existing breweries rose 12 percent in 2010, to $7.6 billion, from the previous year, another measure of these niche brews’ growing popularity.