In a one-year period, Strasburg, Virginia — a town of 6,000 people — saw two new breweries come in. A nearby town, Front Royal, also had a new brewery come in that year. I wanted to see what got the owners to start their breweries and why Virginia as a whole had seen such a large spike in the number of new craft breweries.
I interviewed people at two of the three new breweries in our region, helping me identify a new law that helped one of them come into existence. I also conducted some analysis in Python and built a visualization in d3 to demonstrate how fast the growth had been.