Generally speaking, and as compared to beer available in the U. S., is there less alcohol content in the beers in Germany?
A quick online search shows they’re about the same.
Coming from the country whose national flagship brew is Bud Lite?
There is alcohol-free beer in Germany, and alcohol reduced stuff too, but if we are talking about beer, proper beer, the answer is no. The usual alcohol content of German beer is between 4.5% and 6% alcohol by volume, 5% is probably the most frequent, as it should be IMO. Some seasonal products (Bockbier, Doppelbock, Weihnachtsbockbier, etc.) have a higher content.
Now if you want really alcoholic beer, go to Belgium. They have Duvel (devil): 8.5% ABV. Delirium Tremens (no translation at hand): 8.5% ABV. The Chimay Brewery has various beers, ranging from mostly harmless 4.8% (Chimay Dorée) to 10% ABV (Chimay 150). Just for starters, here is a longer list.
Lots of craft beers in the US are high alcohol IPAs, double IPA, imperial IPAs, which start at 6% and go up to 11% or 12%.
Regular mass market beer (Bud/Light, Coors/Light, etc.) are in the 4-5% range, just like German lagers.
The UK has some really low ABV beers – if you look for session ales, they’ll be down in the 3s and even regular bitters is not much above 4%. Love that stuff!
In the United States, a standard alcoholic drink is 14 grams of ethanol (0.6 fluid ounces [fl oz]), which is equivalent to 12 fl oz of 5% alcohol by volume (ABV) beer, 5 fl oz of 12% ABV wine, or 1.5 fl oz (a typical shot) of 40% ABV (80 proof) distilled spirits.8 Because ethanol has 7 calories per gram, the ethanol content of 1 standard drink is approximately 100 calories, and the non-alcoholic components add further calories.
Sure, craft beers are different. Back in the pre-craft days, stronger ABV beers had to be labeled “malt liquor.” [Schlitz malt liquor was 5.9%]
I don’t know about alcohol content but beer in Germany sure tastes better than that in the US. And I’m not talking about the stuff shipped over here. If you can see the brewery from the beer garden, even better.
I was stationed in Germany before the U.S. craft beer explosion. Different ales and Weizens seemed to be stronger than anything I had before. Coming back to the U.S. made it feel like I was drinking water. Nowadays it’s easy to get beer in many different strengths at any liquor store or decent bar. You can’t make generalizations about the strength of the beer in either country. You have to look at the individual beer strengths.
Guiness feels like it should be strong but it’s only 4.1-4.3%. By comparison Stella is 5.2%.
Just tossing this out…
I homebrew, but don’t claim to know much about anything, but I know that adding a bunch of sugars will make a kick-ass brew. I never bother to test any of my swill, but sometimes I get some really stupefying shit. The “Wake up in the Hammac” stuff.
Would not pass muster in Germany, I imagine.
I have a few “beer friends” who have traveled to Belgium to drink beer. One in particular has never left his US state of birth & residency except for a trip to Belgium.
I rarely drink beer other than at the brewery where it was produced. The exception is when I drink at a local bar that sells local beer.
I agree. After living in Germany for four years, then in Belgium for another two years (and traveling all over Europe), US beer was nearly undrinkable. Thank heavens for the craft beer movement, which was starting to catch on in the 80s.
That’s a large part of it.
German beer is much the same as it’s been for the past 150 or so years, since pilsners became popular.
American beer is its descendant through a couple of major changes.
One of those changes involved the transition to the US, and the different raw materials readily available. Specifically, those were six-row barley malt and native hop varieties (i.e. Cluster). Six-row barley has a much higher protein content than traditional European two-row barley and is/was cultivated more in the US. So US brewers used it. Problem is that higher protein content made their beer cloudy. Their solution was to dilute it with grain adjuncts- specifically corn in the Midwest, and rice in the South and West. This gave rise to a style called the “Classic American Pilsner”, which was similar in gravity (i.e. the amount of barley sugars/proteins per unit of unfermented beer (wort)) to the German brews they were descended from, but had a different flavor due to the use of adjuncts and native hops. These were not weak, watery beers by any stretch, however.
As an aside, the initial gravity of a beer is largely what determines its alcoholic strength, as it represents the amount of sugar that can be fermented.
The second major change was the combination of Prohibition and WW2 not that long after. Bitterness went down, and adjunct percentages went up, landing us where we are today with American megabrews. They’re not less alcoholic than they’ve ever been, but they’re less bitter and less flavorful for sure.
It’s a Latin term, anyway, not Belgian, and it’s used the same way in the English-speaking world (though known more familiarly by its initials, “DTs”). It’s a common symptom of alcohol-addiction withdrawal, also known as “the shakes”.
Bud Lite has the same ABV as Guiness Draught - 4.2%
But as stated already it depends. You can easily get some craft brews in the US with over 10% abv and you can get some with 3-4% abv. I assume the same is for most countries.
I will never learn that people will take whatever you write in the internet literally and that you have to use /s or a 
emoji when you are not serious. It seems I give the impression of being teutonically challenged on the jocular side. Sorry!
When you see the beer in question it all becomes clear, I should have started with that:
And it is not a bad beer, but the best beer in the world is an exageration.
One possibly confounding factor: If you go to Belgium to sample Belgian beers, you’re probably mostly not going to be drinking whatever the local mass-market lowest-denominator beer is. You’re going to be drinking the good stuff. But in your own homeland, even a beer snob is going to have some exposure to the mass-market swill, and will know how common it is. So a beer tourist (from anywhere) will be comparing foreign craft brews to domestic swill, and will thus conclude that foreign beer is better (no matter where they’re from).
In 2023, the best-selling beer in America was Modelo Especial, at 4.4% ABV.