It’s hard to believe it’s been 18 years since I attended my first Craft Brewers Conference. At the time I was working for a beer distributorship in Houston, and the management there was just getting interested in crafts and imports. We had just taken on the Celis brands, and as the CBC was in Austin that year, I persuaded my bosses to let me attend. I was the eager young buck, pad and pencil in hand, ready to take copious notes about this burgeoning new beer category and show my superiors that this thing had legs.And indeed, the microbrewery industry, as it was called then, had long, beautiful, tan Cameron Diaz legs. Everybody and his uncle wanted in. The dot-com bubble was just starting to bloat, and the craft bubble was keeping stride. (more…)