Sportstime 20th gala musical views, and an unrelated digression on the theme of craft beer growth.

From top to bottom, they're Roz Tate, Stephen Powell and Jared Williamson, as captured peforming at last Saturday's Sportstime Pizza 20th anniversary party. Longtime friend and sidekick Paul Nevitt played alongside Roz, who has remained a pub regular even if it had been 12 years since he played music live on site prior to last Saturday's gig. Many readers are familiar with Stephen, who has bartended and served for NABC for many a year, and of course Jared, along with Jesse Williams, brews Progressive Pints in the NABC garage brewhouse.

I'll be traveling with Jared today to Indianapolis for the 12th edition of the Indiana Microbrewers Festival (3:00 p.m. to - 7:00 p.m. at Opti Park at 820 E. 66th St.) It's the state of Indiana's biggest microbrewing celebration, always a great show, and worth using as a pretext for noting that our business sector has much to celebrate. Consider these statistics:

Growth of the craft beer industry was 12% by volume for 2006. The craft beer industry eclipsed 6.7 million barrels of craft beer produced in the U.S. in 2006.

The fastest growing craft beer sector in 2006 was microbreweries (up 16%), showing customer support for local breweries.

Craft beer is the fastest growing segment for supermarket scan data. 17.8% growth was stronger than all other alcohol beverage categories.

Craft beer sales share is 3.20% by volume and 4.99 % by dollars.

Craft beer industry sales have grown 31.5% over the last 3 years.

Total U.S. Craft Beer Industry Annual Dollar Volume: $4.7 billion.

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All that, and it tastes damned good, too.