It makes me excited that beer is filling in the gap here where wine is missing out. Craft beer today very much caters to the younger drinkers, bereft of any beer-tasting credentials, while still being interesting and sporting a huge variety of flavors that appeal to all sorts of "levels" of drinkers. There's breweries all over now and tons of great beer worth trying. It's also simple enough to make that there's a large number of people that have at lest dabbled in brewing, giving a larger number of people who actually do know about the finer points of beer, yet beer isn't holed-up in an ivory tower yet.
There used to be breweries all over the place - macrobrews came into being when the US population became transitory and needed an anchor of home. Thing of it is, beer doesn't much lend itself to macroproduction. Neither does wine. It was a revelation when I was in Switzerland - you really can order "a beer" because everybody pretty much drinks whatever they're brewing down the road. That's how it used to work - everywhere had their local brewery, their local winery, and everybody drank what was around. It'll be that way again. The oldest brewery in the US is, after all, Yuengling.
The first time I went to Munich I thought I had died and gone to Paradise. There, beer is ordered by one of three choices, dark, light or white. The brand of beer you're ordering is pretty much the name of the beer hall you just stepped into. The only negative is that midnight rolls around and they kick you out on your ass with a look from the waiter that says, "Why are you wasting my time here, buddy?" But hey, nothing is perfect.
I t was the same way when I visited Prague. Basically every restaurant was named after its patron brewery. You could order a 10 or a 12 beer. Whatever you got though, it was always excellent. Still, they did have a sense for variety. I walked into one shop that had the walls lined with bottles from all round the local breweries and beyond. A huge number of different beers.