The name says it all: One Guy Brewing.

It’s a statement of fact and of ownership. Walk into the tasting room and you’ll probably see the titular one guy behind the bar: Guy Hagner, brewer, bartender, cook, janitor, everything. This is the ultimate in “micro” breweries.

One Guy is not that micro in terms of floor space. The brewery takes up two large, echoing bays in a former commercial bread bakery, just off the main street in Berwick, Pennsylvania. Berwick, an upstate town of about 10,000, is the home of Cheez Doodles, a PPL Corp. nuclear power plant, and a high-school football team—the Bulldogs—with a statewide reputation. It’s definitely not typical craft-beer territory, what with its largely blue-collar, aging, rural population.

But One Guy is the kind of brewery that’s filling in the craft beer map. The fastest-growing chunk of the industry last year was what the Brewers Association still refers to as microbreweries: not brewpubs, but packaging brewers who make fewer than 15,000 barrels a year, the smallest of the small.

When microbrewing started, back in the 1970s, all the operations were small: a couple of brewers, a mongrel collection of equipment, and cheap (or free) space in garages and empty factories. The microbreweries grew, and became “craft” breweries when it was obvious that they weren’t all that micro anymore. The beers they created established strongholds in cities such as San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Portland (both Oregon and Maine) and spread from there. Around 1994, the growth attracted entrepreneurs who saw the numbers but didn’t understand the business. Over the next three years, market crowding and bad beer led a number of breweries to close. (Read “Capital Punishment.”)

Guy Hagner’s Franconia Brewing, in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, was one of them. Its traditional German beers were excellent, but there wasn’t enough money to get their message out through the market noise. Franconia closed in 1999 after less than a year, and Hagner and his wife declared personal bankruptcy, with more than $1 million in debt. “We were at the end of our ropes, maxed out,” he recalls. “We still haven’t recovered. That changed me, aged me. I’m less optimistic, more cynical.”

One-man brewing offered a way to get back into brewing without the massive debt. Hagner put One Guy together—with a lot of barter and shrewd eBay shopping—for less than $80,000, a figure too low to have been possible for someone without his connections and experience.

One-man brewing offers independence too. Brian Hunt’s been doing it since 1992 with Moonlight Brewing, in Fulton, California. Not having to answer to anyone but his customers lets Hunt follow his muse and create beers like Sublimmminal (yes, that is the correct spelling ) Fresh Hop, a deliciously balanced beer made with fresh hops in every part of the brewing except the kettle, where hops are normally added.

“You can’t do the same things other breweries do,” says Hunt of the very small brewer. “You can’t make Bud, but you can’t make Sierra Nevada Pale Ale either. You have to find something you can do better, and focus on that with your passion and skill.”

Scott Smith has built a solid following for the beer he’s making on his own at East End Brewing in Pittsburgh by promoting directly to drinkers. He delivers kegs—sometimes by bicycle—he does promotions, he fills growlers at the brewery: When you get East End, you get the brewer and the owner.

That’s part of the appeal of these small operations. People may discover a brand like Blue Moon, or Samuel Adams, or New Belgium and embrace it because it’s different, it’s small, and not as many people know about it as they would a mass-market label. But for some, that’s not enough. They want a truly different, truly small beer that next to no one knows about. Savvy retailers want those beers to draw that kind of crowd, the kind that is willing to pay a bit more for a beer they can’t get elsewhere.

Oddly, for these tiny operations, success can seem like a threat: If your beer sells well enough, pressure mounts to expand. Hunt’s brewery is “bursting at the seams,” though so far he’s been able to find ways to make it work. Adding another person represents a large increase in spending and accounting overhead, and small brewers hold off as long as possible.

The pricing threats faced by the industry, which I covered in a November column, “A Harvest of Higher Prices,” have hit the small brewers as well. The problem is less severe, however, because they’re able to make microscopic buys in the lowest tier of the market. Hunt compares it to being in a rowboat when the large brewers steering the Titanic spot an iceberg. “It’s cold in the rowboat, but there’s a big difference in flexibility,” he points out.

One Guy is using that flexibility and independence to try something that doesn’t rely on hops. Hagner has brewed up something he calls Cinnamon Boldy, a lager with honey and Vietnamese cassia cinnamon. It actually drinks a lot better than it sounds—a warming, aromatic beer with a hot, sweet center that’s been doing well in initial sales. Bigger brewers with big budgets may have better equipment, but they don’t have a corner on imagination. A small brewery—a tiny brewery—may be where today’s cutting edge is being honed.