REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. - You can count on a thunderstorm to pump up business at a brewpub. Especially at the shore.

So it was no surprise in the founding manger of Dogfish Head Brewing here, beneath canoes suspended from the rafters, that regulars stayed put, ordering extra rounds, when the skies opened up last week.

On this particular day, they included a vacationing industrial engineer from Boeing, a gray-haired fellow who'd biked up from Ocean City, Md., and a guy in a Beeriotic Table T-shirt, each one a Dogfish disciple - each one in a small way responsible for an extraordinary craft-beer success story being played out in the ugly teeth of the recession: Dogfish Head was doing a bulletproof business.

Beer sales are up a phenomenal 40 percent over last year, 45 percent if you include its first foray into the Nevada market.

What is more remarkable is that those aren't unremarkable numbers for local craft brewers. At Downingtown's award-winning Victory Brewing, sales were up close to 30 percent; at smallish Sly Fox near Phoenixville, hovering close to last year's 38 percent gain.

The secret? Dogfish Head bartender Mike Pfeifer didn't hesitate: "It's a lot easier to get a $4 pint," he said, "than to get a Mercedes."

"It's just better," ventured Bob Farnam, the biker.

"The owner is a genius," offered Steve Haller, the engineer, conceding that the owner, Sam Calagione, did occasionally misstep, once memorably with a seaweed beer said to have the charm and nose of, well, pond scum.

Die, 'yellow fizzy stuff,' die

In the robust, recession-defying craft-beer sector, Calagione is a rock star, handsome and brash. (He once built a rowboat and, as a publicity stunt, rowed the first six-pack from his new brewery in Milton, Del., over to Cape May.)

But it's not just a cult of personality; it's a trend across the top-performing crafts, breweries that ramped up production or entered new markets. Figures released today by the industry's Boulder, Colo.-based Brewers Association, showed a soberer craft picture in general -- nine percent average growth during the first six months of 2009, while overall, total U.S. beer sales dropped slightly.

Still, last year's spikes in volume of 20, 30 and 40 percent remain common among the top 50 craft brewers, and were holding steady: "It's easy to grow," a spokeswoman said, "if the demand is there."

The nimble independents price their beers just a bit more than top-end mass-market brows, and typically less than quality imports, catching niche consumers on the way up -- and down.

They see themselves, moreover, as somewhat nobler -- as champtions of beer's essential truth and virtue (hewing only to barley and wheat, not flavor-diluting rice and corn) - the anti-Bud (and -Miller and -Coors), which together control 78 percent of the $100 billion U.S. beer market.

But if Big Beer's flattening sales continue - and it doesn't wise up - says Nima Hadian, who manages Shangy's, the specialty-beer distributor in Emmaus, Pa., the Big Three could face a shrunken future: By 2015, he sees crafts grabbing a 15 percent market share.

For beer guru Tom Peters, the owner of Monk's Cafe on 16th Street in Philadelphia, the downfall of what he calls "that yellow fizzy stuff" can't come soon enough.

In the last six months, he noted, sales of Philadelphia Pale Ale, the flagship brew of Yards Brewing, have tripled.

To him, that's like sunshine on a cloudy day.

Food-enhancing qualities

Craft brewing is about letting a thousand styles bloom.

And once a drinker bonds with one, there's no going back: "If you've had a halfway decent wine," says Larry Bennett, the self-styled "Minister of Propaganda" at Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, N.Y., "you don't go back to Boone's Farm."

The craft mafia, of course, wants you to quit wine altogether. Calagione cheerily debunks the high-end wine trade, a sector he sees mortally wounded by hocus-pocus and snobbery.