My colleagues at Planet Money had a great post last week looking at the growth of small breweries in the United States, which are increasingly supplanting traditional beer makers:
Beer production has been flat in the U.S. for decades — it's actually a tiny bit lower than it was 30 years ago (find a comprehensive data set here). And the number of big breweries has gone down.
But over the same time, the number of small, independent breweries in America has exploded.
Mmm... beer. In this chart, the blue area is traditional breweries; orange is specialty brewers. As you can see, there's been a massive shift from large- to small-scale.
One of my goals here was to figure out stacked area charts in D3. One thing that continues to trip me up is the coordinate system, where (0,0) is the top-left corner, not the bottom-left. That means height is set by pushing elements down, not up. The complete code is below.