Sharpwing wrote:Insulting beer is like insulting football and insulting football is like insulting every European all at once!
So them's fighting words!
And uh... only being drunk 4 times total in you're entire life? Uh... I wonder how that makes me look... it happens to me at least once a week. Surely I'm not alone in this? JP help me out!
Many people give beer a bad rap because of inexperience or ignorance to the craft. College kids drink the cheapest and easiest brew for keggers, people make fun of Nascar fans drinking beer, and people think beer is for poor people.
Many of the circumstances that made American beers so bad were actually beyond their control. The first big hit came with WW1, when grains were diverted to the war effort. The biggest hit came with Prohibition. Breweries laid down their recipes and started making ice cream, sodas, and "near beer". And when Prohibition was lifted, many of the brewers hadn't survived the finacial strain, and lots of good old world skills were lost. Major breweries like Budweiser survived and consumed the market. Then as beer started expanding again, WW2 settles in over the country. Beer makers are again faced with not enough grains to make the product, but are being asked to ship thousands of tons of it overseas to the troops fighting in Europe and the Pacific. So they do the only thing they can to fill the orders, they thin the beer with things like rice and use less grains per barrell, and less hops per barrell. The result is a light, watery beer with much less flavor. But the guys overseas and the people at home accustomize to this new beer, and by wars end, that's what beer is. And after the war, the brewers believe they can save money producing this lighter and thinner flavored beer, so they continue making beers with rice and other unflattering ingredients. So American beer earns the reputation, rightly so, as Piss water.
To make matters worse, you couldn't legally brew beer in your own home until 1978 when President Carter made it legal. And after that, there was an explosion of small do-it-themselves companies that reintroduced the art and craft of brewing. Guys like Jim Koch of Sam Adams, who if the myth is true, curled all the wallpaper in his wife's kitchen with his first batch of homebrew, start to get American tastes interested in old world flavors again. Microbrews are born and take off across the country. And the beauty of beer is that no two recipes are ever the same. A microbrew from California doesn't taste like Great Lakes in Cleveland OH. There's so much potential to set yourself apart from the crowd by making a truly artful beer now. Even the big boys like Bud are taking notice and developing their own lines of small handcrafted beers. Many Americans are again interested in taste and quality vs quantity and price. There are beers that a single bottle can run you $100. There are beers for nearly every known variation, for nearly anyone's tastes. Porters, Stouts, IPA, traditional lagers, beers with chocolate in them, pumpkin beers, Wheat beers, import beers from all over the world, seasonal beers, and regular beers like Bud and Miller.
Beer is a craft. There are more breweries in this country then distilleries, because beer is still the preferred drink among millions, poor and rich.
*Edit- this is actually my second attempt at this post, because I had a more thorough post written, but when I hit Submit, it came back and said "No Post Mode Selected".
That's a higher proof then vodka you buy at a grocery store in Ohio.
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