Is it the last call for craft beer as acquisitions slow and competing small breweries ramp up?

Not too long ago, craft brewers and their fans were worried about larger competitors putting them out of business.

The likes of Anheuser-Busch InBev were snapping up craft breweries at a brisk clip in the middle of the decade, changing little but the back-office management and creating a stable of what many derisively dubbed phantom crafts: They tasted and looked the same, but they weren’t legit.

Last year Jim Koch, co-founder and chairman of Boston Beer, the maker of Samuel Adams, warned in the New York Times of a “last call for craft beer”: “Drinkers buying cute-sounding brands like Goose Island or Terrapin or Ten Barrel are often unaware that these brands, some of them once independent, are now just subsidiaries of AB InBev or Molson Coors, which are not transparent about disclosing their true ownership anywhere on the bottle.”

But while AB InBev and its peers have continued to gobble craft competitors, the pace of acquisitions has slowed — one AB InBev acquisition in 2017, for instance, vs. four in 2015.

And the number of new craft breweries and brewpubs has continued to rise — to 995 in 2017, from 990 the year before and 877 in 2015, according to the Brewers Association, a trade group for smaller producers. The estimated 6,500 craft breweries in the nation of mid-2018 are more than triple the number at the start of the decade.

That, not corporations buying independent brands, is the real problem for craft brewers, and maybe for the U.S. economy. The existential threat comes from not AB InBev but the small operation down the street coming out with its own IPA or Belgian sour.

Take the case of Smuttynose. A New Hampshire mainstay with national reach since the late 1990s, the brewery was sold at foreclosure auction in March. One of its founders, a former Brooklyn schoolteacher, said competition from newer breweries drove the distressed sale. Why? Competition from other craft breweries.

It’s more than just consumers wanting flavors and styles beyond Samuel Adams Boston Lager: Craft brewers, old and new alike, have all ridden a wave of investment, financing and consumer spending since the financial crisis in 2008, but that wave can’t take them that much higher.

Much of the financing is in the form of loans that take advantage of historically low interest rates. A sizable chunk, too, comes from angel investors and from privateequity firms flush with post-crisis investments themselves. Private-equity firms have invested heavily in well-known breweries such as Dogfish Head, Cigar City, Oskar Blues and Stone — which in June became the first independent U.S. craft brewery to open a taproom in China.

Then there’s consumer spending. Americans have money to drop, and they’re dropping it. Most of it is going toward services, but vices such as alcohol are benefiting. In 2017, Americans spent $241.8 billion on alcohol, up 2.7 percent from the year before; in general, Americans tend to spend more on alcohol in flusher economic times than in choppier ones.

Finally, a sharp per-barrel excise tax cut for beer included in the Republican tax legislation at the end of 2017 is rippling through the industry in forms of lower operating costs and greater output. The tax cut — the most significant since a mid1970s slice that helped spark the modern craft beer revolution — applied almost entirely to smaller breweries.

But inflation is starting to drive up prices of goods. And we haven’t even discussed the tariffs proposed or executed by President Donald Trump. One on imported aluminum, in particular, could end up walloping the bottom lines of craft brewers, who will probably pass along any extra costs to consumers.

For now, though, things look sunny — for the overall U.S. economy. For craft beer, it’s another story, and a possibly predictive one at that.

In the 1990s, what turned out to be another decade-long economic expansion lifted craft beer to dizzying new heights. Toward the end of the decade, there were more than 1,500 craft breweries and brewpubs, an improbable milestone.

Then the keg went dry. Loans on new breweries and brewery expansions came due. Breweries looked around and found fewer customers as a few years before. Banks stopped lending. The economy overall started to wobble. Hundreds of breweries closed or reduced their footprints between 1999 and 2001.

The craft beer bust preceded the turn-of-the-century recession by about a year. It’s impossible, of course, to say whether history will repeat itself. But the times do taste familiar, and the good times in craft beer have turned out not to be so good. Will the good times in the economy end up the same?