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O’Fallon, Mo. • This time last year, O’Fallon Brewery was fading out of sight.

After growing for most of a decade, St. Louis’ second-largest craft brewer hit a wall. Its co-founders ran out of cash. Beer-making ground to a halt. Six-packs on store shelves dwindled.

But now O’Fallon is on pace to sell more in 2012 than ever before. And next month, the company will launch a new brew, its first since the near-death experience.

The downs and ups at O’Fallon highlight the growing pains of the fast-growing craft beer industry, here and nationwide. It also highlights the challenges many entrepreneurs face as they try to scale up from mom-and-pop to middleweight. In this case, rebirth required a new owner and a key change in partners.

While big brewers such as Anheuser-Busch InBev have seen sales slip in recent years, the world of small craft brewers is hopping. Sales grew 14 percent in the first half of 2011, according to trade group Brewers Association, and industry watchers say it hasn’t slowed since. New small breweries are popping up like sunflowers — including at least a half dozen either open or in the works in St. Louis in the past year.

But as demand for boutique beers has grown, some brewers have struggled to keep pace — both with output and with the business savvy needed to grow efficiently. Tony and Fran Caradonna were no exception.

They launched O’Fallon in 2000, and along with brew master Brian Owens, made, bottled and even delivered beer themselves. Sales grew, slow but steady, to 2,900 barrels — the equivalent of about 980,000 12-ounce bottles — in 2008 around the Midwest. They had a couple of rough years in 2007 and 2008, but demand continued to grow, so the O’Fallon hired a Wisconsin brewery to make their bottled beer, expanded to 11 states, and signed on with a small distributor in Missouri. Sales doubled, but the deals left them strapped for cash. By early last year, the whole operation was on the ropes. The Caradonnas had to cut hours for their handful of employees, and stop making beer while they looked for investors.

“It was our baby,” Fran Caradonna said. “But it was time to bring in some new ideas and new skills.”

Enter Jim Gorczyca.

A longtime marketing executive at Anheuser-Busch, he was ready to strike out on his own. Like Tony Caradonna, he was a brewery tour guide growing up in south St. Louis. He met the Caradonnas and they reached a deal: Gorczcya would buy a 96 percent stake in the brewery, the Caradonnas would stay on working there, and they would relaunch O’Fallon with a mix of big-beer business savvy and craft beer’s focus on flavor.

The sale closed in May, and Owens went right back to work, pumping out kegs at the brewery and road-tripping to Stevens Point, Wis., to supervise the bottling operation. Loyal customers were glad to see the beer back on shelves, Owens said, and O’Fallon gradually won back tap handles in bars. By the end of 2011, sales were about the same as they had been in 2010 — 6,000 barrels.

Next month, O’Fallon will add a new brew to its lineup, a summer seasonal called Kite Tail. It’s a cream ale, crisp and light, flavorful but also designed to draw more traditional beer drinkers — who may not want lots of hops and dark, heavy beers — into a craft brand like O’Fallon.

“There’s an opportunity to build a bridge back to the mainstream,” Gorczyca said. “We need to invite the broader audience over to craft.”

The brewery has made other tweaks, too. To save money, it’s entering longer-term contracts with suppliers and trying to take advantage of seasonal price swings for ingredients. It’s buying billboards and ads to launch Kite Tail, and rolling out new, more eye-catching tap handles for each of its five brews.

But the biggest change is this: One day last week, a delivery truck with a Bud Light logo on its side pulled up at the brewery. One of the first things Gorczyca did when he took over was sign deals with Anheuser-Busch’s wholesalers across Missouri. O’Fallon’s sales force grew exponentially.

“Now we have hundreds of guys out there selling our beer every day,” he said.

And they are selling more of it. Gorczyca says O’Fallon is on pace to move 13,000 barrels this year — twice its prior peak. As a private company, O’Fallon doesn’t share financials, but Gorczyca said he expects to turn a profit by year’s end. Next year, he hopes to do 15,000 barrels, large enough to achieve “regional brewery” status with the Craft Brewers Association. Getting over that hump — there were 80 “regional breweries” in 2010, with the only local one being Schlafly parent St. Louis Brewing Co. — would help put O’Fallon on the map.

“There’s a magnitude there,” Gorczyca said. “It gives you some credibility.”

The other thing O’Fallon is planning to raise its profile is a new home, something with a bit more presence than its yellow warehouse in a little industrial park off Interstate 70. Beer-lovers come by — even though a sign on the front door says they don’t give tours these days — but Gorczyca said he envisions a bigger brewing facility, a proper bar, and a nice place to eat. Probably to open in the second half of next year.

“We’ve kind of run out of space,” he said. “And we want a place where people can come visit.”

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VANCOUVER

Every Tuesday morning, Teri Dobbins-Baxter starts her commute at 4 a.m.

She leaves home in the south suburbs of Chicago and goes to Midway Airport, where she hops a flight to St. Louis. Then she makes her way to Midtown, where she works as a law professor at St. Louis University. She then spend two days teaching and meeting with students, and flies home Wednesday night.

The ranks of people like Dobbins-Baxter – who live in one metro area but work in another – are growing fast. Technology continues to untether employees from their workplaces, while the weak job market and a lousy housing market has many families reluctant to relocate.

A study issued last month by New York University found that the jobs with this sort of arrangement climbed sharply in eight of 10 large metro areas from 2002 to 2009.

A Post-Dispatch analysis of the same Census data found that the number of St. Louisans who work in Chicago and in Kansas City – and vice versa – more than doubled in that time.

In all, about 98,000 people – one in 11 working St. Louisans – has a job in a different metro area. About 120,000 people who live elsewhere have a job here.

Some of these people work from home for companies in a different region. Some are traditional road-warriors who travel all over. Some, like Dobbins-Baxter, have a regular commute, just one that spans states instead of a county line.

Regardless, said Mitchell Moss, the NYU professor who authored the study, the trend speaks to both the increased flexibility of modern-day workers – “the office” can be almost anyplace – and the challenges facing two-income families in a weak job market: Why uproot your family when your spouse can’t get a job in the new city?

The trend illustrates how the economies of places like St. Louis are increasingly hitched to their neighbors.

“It tells you that there is an inter-regional economic relationship, which is growing between places like St. Louis and Chicago,” Moss said. “A region’s workforce is not defined by its immediate suburbs.”

It also has implications for the people who live and work this way. Take Dara Taylor.

She works for a Boston-based healthcare policy nonprofit, from her apartment in the Central West End. She’s from St. Louis. Her boyfriend and family live here. About a year and a half ago, she became the nonprofit’s first remote employee.

“Everything I do is by phone or e-mail or by travel,” said Taylor, who has worked for the organization for two years. “Because that’s the case, I can work from another city.”

So Taylor spends a lot of time on Skype and conference calls with colleagues from the home office. She travels two or three times a month to other states and occasionally back to Boston. In some ways, this arrangement is more flexible, but Taylor said she finds it forces her to be more efficient.

“You’d think you can just roll out of bed and log in,” she said. “But it requires a great deal of discipline. I actually work more (here) than I did in the office. It probably has to do with making up for not being there in person.”

Then there are those for whom the road is the office. Jason Stokes lives in St. Louis but works in quality improvement for a Dallas-based company that makes pumps and seals for oil wells and power plants. He visits projects all over the world.

“Last year I spent 190 nights in hotel rooms,” he said by phone Monday from Los Angeles, where he’s wrapping up a three-week stint before heading to Virginia and then India installment payday loans. “That was actually less than some years.”

All the travel’s not so glamorous, Stokes said, and it’s exhausting. While he spends most weekends and off days at home, he misses his wife – who’s in graduate school at Washington University, which is why they live in St. Louis – and their nine-month-old son. But he tried office life for a while and found the 9-to-5 routine just wasn’t for him.

“It requires a real mindset change,” Stokes said. “I wasn’t ready for it.”

Others find themselves making longer commuting for longer than they planned, like Dobbins-Baxter.

She was living in St. Louis three years ago; then she married a man from Chicago, with a career and large family there. The opportunities, she said, were better for her in Chicago than for him in St. Louis. So she moved up, they bought a house, and she began flying down to SLU, with thoughts of finding a job in her new hometown.

Three years – and two small children – later, Dobbins-Baxter is still commuting, working long hours while she’s in St. Louis and splitting time between home and job when she’s in Chicago.

Her husband now works from home – which makes moving to St. Louis more of an option – but, she says, they’d probably lose money if they sold their house right now.

“That’s really one of the biggest considerations in not moving at this point,” she said.

All these things – family, housing, the complexity of managing two careers in a weak job market – are big reasons why this sort of two-city existence is growing. Add in employers who are willing to be more flexible and technology that enables it, and Moss said he expects that growth will continue.

It can be a grind – Taylor, Dobbins-Baxter and Stokes all said they don’t plan this kind of work life permanently. But at least for now, in this splintered economy and ever-connected world, it makes sense.

“We have to realize that skilled people are going to find work,” said Moss. “Even if it’s not in the same city where they live.”

JOBS OUTSIDE THE HOMETOWN

Nearly 100,000 people live in St. Louis but have jobs based in a different metro area, an increase of 44 percent since 2002, according to Census data.

Region         St. Louisans who work there       Change since 2002

Kansas City              12,878                                    118.2%

Chicago                      8,436                                    114.5%

Springfield, Ill.            7,397                                         2.2%

Jefferson City, Mo       5,883                                       43.8%

Columbia, Mo.            5,726                                       10.2%

Source: Census Bureau

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Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy may be enjoying the European Central Bank

Egypt’s Islamist-dominated parliament has overwhelmingly voted in favor of ensuring that its own lawmakers will comprise the bulk of a panel that will write the country’s constitution.

Lawmakers Saturday voted on the criteria for the makeup of a 100-member panel drafting the document. The Islamists, who dominate the parliament, want a formidable presence on the panel to ensure a strong voice in the process.

Many Christian and liberal lawmakers are wary of Islamists taking too prominent a role same day payday loans.

In the end, lawmakers voted that 50 members of the 100-member panel drafting the first constitution after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak must come from the parliament.

The remaining 50 will be legal experts, academics and religious scholars.

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Claims for jobless benefits dropped last week to match a four-year low, and U.S. consumer confidence rose to the highest since 2008, signaling an improving labor market may boost household spending.

Applications for unemployment insurance payments fell by 14,000 to 351,000 in the period ended March 10, Labor Department figures showed today. The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index rose to minus 33.7 from minus 36.7 in the week ended March 11.

Premier Wen Jiabao warned Wednesday that ruinous turmoil that engulfed China in the past could re-emerge unless the country tackles political reforms, and he rebuked a populist fellow leader over a scandal that brought infighting among officials into public view.

In a three-hour news conference, his sole such event of the year, Wen renewed a call for unspecified political reforms, particularly of the Communist Party leadership, saying that without them China’s hard-won prosperity might fizzle. No democratic firebrand, Wen has issued similarly vague pleas before _ and become a popular if lone voice among senior leaders by doing so. This time his tone was more emphatic, as was the setting.

The news conference was his last scheduled briefing before the prim 69-year-old steps down in a year after a decade in office. He said he is “seized by a strong sense of responsibility” to speak out and referred repeatedly to the judgment of history. Corruption, the rich-poor gap and plummeting government credibility that beset China require institutional changes, he said.

To cap his plea, he made rare mention of the Cultural Revolution, 10 years of factional battles and radical egalitarianism that spiraled into violence in which millions were persecuted and many reform-minded leaders were jailed, sent into internal exile or left to die.

“Without successful political reform, it is impossible for us to fully institute economic system reform. The gains we have made in this area may also be lost,” Wen told reporters in the Great Hall of the People. “New problems that have cropped up in China’s society will not be fundamentally resolved and such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution may happen again,”

The recurring references to the past and the wistful, reflective tone turned the premier’s news conference into something of a swan song for the most popular member of the usually remote leadership. Sometimes called “Grandpa Wen,” he comes across as warm and caring. He has been shown eating dumplings with coal miners and consoling survivors of the devastating Sichuan earthquake and other disasters.

As the No. 3 in the party leadership who is primarily responsible for the economy, Wen fielded a range of questions, from local government debt to currency reform. He offered Chinese funding of U.S. infrastructure projects to create American jobs and rebalance lopsided economic ties with a crucial trading partner. He sidestepped a question asking his views of the democratic uprisings in parts of the Arab world.

Wen sounded resolute on government efforts to deflate a property bubble, saying “home prices in China are far from coming back to a reasonable level.” The Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets swooned, bucking the trend in markets elsewhere buoyed by strong Wall Street gains.

Wen, President Hu Jintao and most of the leadership are stepping down to hew to unwritten rules of succession and make way for younger leaders. The turnover always invites divisive infighting that the party prefers to keep under wraps.

That image of unity was ruptured last month by the cashiering of a top official in the mega-city of Chongqing who fled overnight to a U.S. consulate, reportedly to seek political asylum. Asked by a reporter about Deputy Mayor Wang Lijun’s still unexplained fall, Wen issued the harshest criticism to date of Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai, perhaps signaling the once-rising star is unlikely to be promoted to the uppermost ranks of power.

“The current party committee and the government of Chongqing must seriously reflect on the Wang Lijun incident and learn lessons from this incident,” Wen said.

While not mentioning Bo by name, Wen once again delved into the past. He said the investigation into the scandal “should be able to stand the test of the law and history.” He recalled the tortuous diversions into political campaigns that sidetracked China’s climb from poverty to world power. The comments seemed a swipe at Bo, who has promoted mass sing-alongs of communist anthems and other “red” culture that some see as worrisome preference of the extreme politics of the past.

Wen was characteristically humble throughout his appearance as he looked back on his nine years as premier and 45 years in government service, since his start as a political instructor to geological survey teams in the poor inland province of Gansu.

“Due to my incompetent abilities and institutional and other factors, there is still much room for improvement in my work,” Wen said. “I should assume responsibility for the problems that have occurred in China’s economy and society during my term in office for which I feel truly sorry.”

Wen appeared visibly slower, the pauses in his speech longer than in years past. Rumors within the diplomatic corps say he has been unwell for months, turning much of his workload over to Vice Premier Li Keqiang, his expected successor. Wen told reporters two years ago he liked to jog and swim to stay fit, though has little time for it, and he has been shown on state television playing basketball with Chinese high school students and baseball in Japan.

As for his retirement plans, Wen said little other than that he might like to visit Taiwan, the democratic island China claims as its own. He said he believes that a retired official should “conduct himself with humility and self-reflection.”

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