LEWISTON — When cans of beer from Baxter Brewing hit shelves in January, they’ll join a crowded field.

More than a dozen Maine breweries offer bottled beer. Some, such as Shipyard, are available nationwide. Others bottle by hand in small batches. No one else is canning.

If there’s one thing they have in common, it’s that business is very good.

“We’re trending at about 10 to 12 percent over 2009,” said David Geary, founder of Geary’s, New England’s oldest brewery. In 2009, his brewery produced about 20,000 barrels and distributed beer to 14 states.

Luke Livingston, president of Baxter Brewing, projects that he’ll sell about 5,000 barrels of his ales in 2011. That’s equal to more than 1.6 million cans, and enough to make him Maine’s fourth-biggest brewer by 2009 figures.

His system allows him to brew 30 barrels at a time before moving the beer to one of several fermenting and conditioning tanks. Livingston acknowledges it’s a big system for a new brewery.

“It was sort of a ‘go big or go home’ mentality,” he said of the decision to start a large brewery. He plans to meet with Massachusetts distributors next week and start selling there by summer.

It’s ambitious but not unrealistic. According to the Brewers Association, an advocacy group for craft brewers, craft beer grew 9 percent by volume and 12 percent in dollars over last year in the first half of 2010. That’s in spite of a 2.7 percent drop on overall beer sales.

Craft brewers, defined by the Brewers Association as small, independent and traditional, have been posting huge gains for years.

Demand insatiable

Scott Oliver, craft beer manager for Pine State Beverage, said the market for high-end beer is “insatiable.”

Oliver’s position is a new one, added at the beginning of November so the company could respond to the growing craft beer market. He’s educating consumers and other Pine State employees on beer history and pairings of different styles with food.

Oliver said he’s seen strong interest in Baxter beers in stores and restaurants around the state. He estimated that in the 14 counties where Pine State sells beer, all but York and Cumberland, about 10 percent of beer sales go to craft brands.

When Geary’s brewery opened 24 years ago, the idea of a local brewery was new to Mainers.

“There was a lot of explaining to people exactly what it was we were doing,” Geary recalled. “They’d scratch their heads and say, ‘What, you make it in your bathtub?’”

Still, he found early support from retail chains and Portland bars such as Three Dollar Dewey’s and the Great Lost Bear.

Ed Stebbins, who co-founded Gritty McDuff’s, likes to tell a story about when the pub first opened in 1988 and he tended bar on Saturday nights.

“I was really proud to serve the beers I brewed,” Stebbins said. One night, a man came in and asked him for a Budweiser.

“I said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, we only serve the beers we brew here,’” he said. “The guy, without missing a beat, looked me in the eye and said, ‘OK, son, brew me a Budweiser.’ That’s the way it was.”

In the late 1980s, Stebbins said, no one in the U.S. was selling brewing systems for small breweries.

That’s where Alan Pugsley came in.

Craft beer’s Johnny Appleseed

Pugsley, born in England, had worked under a brewer named Peter Austin at the Ringwood Brewery. Austin’s Hampshire, England brewery was popular in the Real Ale movement, a push by English publicans for a return to old-fashioned, cask-conditioned beers.

Austin began using his skill as a brewer to help others build their own breweries, and hired Pugsley to help him. It was during that time that Pugsley met David Geary.

Geary was a connoisseur of the English and Scottish beers served at Three Dollar Dewey’s in Portland. He became friends with Peter Maxwell Stuart, a Scotsman who traveled to America to promote his beer, Traquair House.

Stuart invited Geary to learn brewing and brewery operation in Scotland. Geary took him up on it, and while traveling in Scotland and England, he met Pugsley at Ringwood.

Geary hired Pugsley to help him set up a brewery in Portland. Pugsley helped him order a 25-barrel brewery from England and have it shipped over. He helped Geary create Geary’s Pale Ale using the Ringwood yeast from Austin’s brewery, a distinctive and fast-acting strain that would come to characterize New England beer.

After Geary’s opened, Pugsley started his own company, Pugsley Brewing Systems International. His influence on beer in the Northeast earned him the nickname “the Johnny Appleseed of brewing.”

Maine’s first brew pub

In 1988, he set up Gritty’s brew pub in Portland. It was Maine’s first brew pub since Prohibition. During the pub’s construction, Stebbins said he honed his brewing skill working at Geary’s.

Stebbins and his business partner, Richard Pfeffer, called Pugsley back to Maine in 1991 when they were considering opening a new brew pub in Kennebunkport. They brought their friend, Fred Forsley, a real estate investor who had started Fred Forsley Realty at 19 years old.

Forsley and Pugsley became partners in a business that what would become the Shipyard Brewery.

“After we opened up the brewery in Portland, it started to take off on draft and we couldn’t produce enough of it in Kennebunk,” Forsley said. “In ’96, we were the fastest-growing micro in the country.”

Enter Miller Brewing

But growth is expensive for breweries, and Forsley needed a way to fund it. “We looked at a lot of options. We looked at raising money with partners, we looked at going public, we looked at partnering with other liquor companies, beer companies.”

In 1995, Forsley decided to sell half of the company to Miller Brewing to help pay expansion costs.

“At the time, the philosophy at Miller was to let the micros do what the micros do. They didn’t try to take them over,” he said.

Shipyard bought Miller’s share back in 2000.

In 2009, Shipyard brewed about 82,000 barrels, including contract brewing for Gritty’s and other breweries. Pugsley expects to end 2010 with 95,000 to 97,000 barrels brewed. A brewery expansion is planned in the spring.

However, Sea Dog, another brew pub Pugsley helped launch, went bankrupt after it began bottling. Shipyard bought the brand and today, Sea Dog’s blueberry-flavored Bluepaw is one of Shipyard’s best sellers.

Baxter learns from past

At Baxter, in Lewiston, Livingston said he learned the lesson of breweries that couldn’t keep up with expansion.

He’s done a lot of research into the growth of canned craft beer and believes he’ll need his large brewing system once summer beer sales pick up and his beer hits the Massachusetts market, Livingston said.

Right now, he has two 60-barrel fermenters and two 120-barrel conditioning tanks, where beer goes after fermentation and before canning to smooth out its flavors.

The brewery has space for four more fermenters and another conditioning tank.

“We’ve designed it so we can scale up quickly, if necessary,” Livingston said.

Boutique beer growing too

Not all Maine breweries are made to be giants. Boutique breweries such as the Maine Beer Company and Marshall Wharf have been popping up for the past few years, filling niches in the Maine beer market.

Maine Beer co-founder David Kleban said he didn’t know whether his hoppy Peeper Ale, which runs about $5 for a 16 oz. bottle, would find a market. He and his brother Daniel started in July 2009 in a garage with a one-barrel system he calls “a glorified home brew set-up.”

Kleban took coolers of his beer to restaurants and supermarkets he thought could sell a somewhat pricey beer. Peeper Ale was soon in Whole Foods, Downeast Beverage and Novare Res Bier Cafe in Portland. The beer sold out and soon he was getting orders he couldn’t fill.

“Last summer was pretty painful because we basically just told a bunch of people no,” Kleban said. “They’d ordered a ton of cases and we’d give them maybe one.”

He and his brother have upgraded to a 15-barrel system and will be selling beer in Vermont and Massachusetts this year. He said his goal was to reach about 3,000 barrels a year and stay there.

His beers, both Peeper and Zoe, have received rave reviews. With dozens of user reviews on the website Beer Advocate, Peeper and Zoe are ranked the seventh best beer in the American Pale Ale and American Amber Ale categories, respectively. That puts them above hundreds of beers of the same style.

In Belfast, the Marshall Wharf brewery brews what many call “extreme beer.” They brew beers at more than 11 percent alcohol, using nontraditional ingredients such as blue agave and oysters. So far, they’ve only been available at the 3Tides restaurant in Belfast and on tap at a few restaurants in Portland and Belfast.

“We’re such a small scale,” owner David Carlson said. “We’re a seven-barrel system and that really limits us as far as going out and putting things on the shelf. But one of the things my two brewers and I really enjoy is just the wide variety of beers that we brew.”

At 3Tides, Marshall Wharf offers 17 beers on tap.

Carlson said the brewery soon will release a limited line of bottled beers that have been aged for two years in Heaven Hill whiskey barrels. Two-year aged beers are almost unheard of. Carlson said he expects to ask $15 to $20 for his 22-ounce bottles.

Baxter price: $8 to $10 a 6-pack

Far from the niche market prices of Marshall Wharf, Livingston said his beer will be priced comparatively with Shipyard, Geary’s and Sebago, which typically run between $8 and $10 for a six-pack.

Maine’s first brewer said that while competition between Maine breweries can be “fierce,” he wishes Livingston well.

“I think it’s pretty innovative to go with cans,” Geary said.  He said Baxter’s best asset is its brew master, Mike LaCharite, whom Geary called “a really talented guy.”

Among Maine’s large-scale brewers, Livingston will be the first to offer West Coast-style, American ales. Shipyard, Geary’s and others offer subtle, English-style ales, with their elegant balance of sweet and bitter. Allagash in Portland makes strong, experimental Belgian-style ales.

“In terms of what’s going on in the middle with American-style stuff, there’s not a whole lot commercially available. That’s the niche …” Livingston said, stopping to correct himself. “That’s the void we’re hoping to fill.”

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