Earlier this year I wrote about the history of beer in the US. In it I argued that the current boom in craft/micro brewing is merely a return to the original beer culture that existed for the greater part of America’s history.
The New Yorker just put out an interesting map showing the rise of craft breweries of which there are now more than 2,300 in the US. The most surprising finding is that the areas experiencing the biggest growth are in the South and Southwest – outside of the traditional craft brew centers in the New England and the Pacific Coast. Also interesting is that craft brews represent 30% of total beer sales at Costco (hardly a place reputed for craft anything).
Derek Thompson of The Atlantic recently wrote about the evolving drinking habits of Americans. We are drinking more bottled water, wine, spirits and tea and less of just about everything else.
Beer seems to be way out but it really depends on which type of beer you’re talking about. While the traditional light American lager is in decline, stronger, more flavorful microbrews are experiencing a sort of boom right now. This isn’t new however. If anything, we are rediscovering the American beer heritage that was destroyed by prohibition.
From early colonial times all the way up until the mid-19th century, American beers were mostly styled after British ales. German style lagers (Budweiser, Miller and Coors are modern light versions of this) became popular because they lasted longer on shelves and offered economies of scale that ales could not compete with.
Ales are dark and lagers are light – not a rule but generally true for commercial brews.
These dark, heavy ales and light crisp lagers coexisted for almost a century. And then in 1919, the US government banned alcohol. Hard alcohol, unlike beer, was potent enough to offer bootleggers the incentive to illegally produce and sell the stuff. Beer was simply too week to survive and as a result, the industry was almost entirely wiped out.
Following prohibition, the large lager producers came to completely dominate the market. Whereas their success in the 19th century was alongside the traditional ale consumed by Americans and colonialists for centuries, prohibition effectively made everyone start from scratch. The large companies had a leg up in this race and were quick to capture market share as well as important government contracts for producing beer for soldiers during WW2. Beer as a whole died, but only lagers were reborn.
In the post-WW2 period, companies discovered that if they take an already watered down beer, and water it down some more, but add the word “light” to it, Americans would love it. Bud Light and Coors light account for approximately 40% of the American beer market. Things began to change in the 1980s.
Until 1978, brewing beer at home was still illegal (thank you Jimmy Carter). By the early 80s, microbreweries began to grow. Shockingly, customers wanted tasty beers. In many ways, the largest of these, the Boston Beer Co. (makers of Samuel Adams) and Sierra Nevada are barely microbreweries anymore – they are the 5th and 7th largest breweries in the country.
As the Atlantic article stated, overall beer sales are down. When you factor in that craft and microbrews have been growing steadily over the past couple of decades, the piss poor American beer that the rest of the world makes fun of is in even faster decline.
This reduction in quantity coincides with a dramatic increase in quality. It’s an attempt to get at what American beer culture would have been like had prohibition not ruined it for almost a century. But perhaps the most fun aspect of the country’s renewed love of crafting beer is all the silly names. So far, my favorite is McGuire’s “I’ll Have What The Gentleman On The Floor Is Having Barley Wine“.
Expensive wines taste better, but only if we know they’re expensive.
I like wine, but am about as far from being a connoisseur as one can get. I believe there are good wines and bad wines, but feel we often equate good with expensive. I enjoy reading articles that validate my own plebeian understanding and expose the prestige game that drives much of the wine industry, which topped $32 billion in sales last year in the US, making it the largest wine market in the world.
Jonah Lehrer recently asked on the New Yorker website, Does all wine taste the same? He referenced the now mythical “Judgement of Paris” – the 1976 blind tasting in which a Napa Valley Cabernet beat out bunch of French heavyweights, sending shock waves throughout the wine world. Needless to say, the French judges were not happy. Hollywood even made a cheesy movie about it in 2008.
Earlier this year I wrote about the history of beer in the US. In it I argued that the current boom in craft/micro brewing is merely a return to the original beer culture that existed for the greater part of America’s history.
MR CYRIAC GOES TO WASHINGTON 