Are craft micro-brews a new (say, last 2-3 decades) thing? How about the wide variety of imports available at my neighborhood liquor store? When my pops reached legal drinking age* (in 1969), were his choices limited to Budweiser and swill (Pabst Blue Ribbon, Hamms, Old Style, etc.)? Or could he have scored a Stella Artois and/or a Honey Uberweiss from a specialty brewer in Santa Fe if he was willing to pay for it (and knew where to look)?
*Assume a small Midwestern city like Springfield, Illinois. I get that things may have been different in larger cities and/or coastal cities.
There’s undoubtedly far more choices available now than in, say, the 1970s, due both to the microbrews and the increased availability of imports.
If you go back further (to, say, the 1950s and 1960s), there would probably have been a larger number of small, local or regional breweries available in any particular area (that being before the time that the big national breweries largely squashed them)…but, in any particular town (particularly a smaller market), you wouldn’t have had a large number of them, and you also probably wouldn’t have frequently (if ever) seen the smaller labels from other parts of the country in your local liquor store.
Yes, it is hugely different and it isn’t an issue of the last few decades. It is mainly the past 10 to 20 years and the number of domestically produced beers is still growing. There are more varieties of beer produced today in the U.S. than there ever have been. Outside of large cities, you used to (before the mid 1990’s) be able to get mainly just the large domestic beers plus a few standard imports like Heineken and Corona. Some stores may have carried a few more but they didn’t sell that well and many of the common brands today like Sierra Nevada didn’t exit except in certain markets.
American consumer tastes changed rapidly in the 1990’s and more and more beers started being made. Microbrewery bars and restaurants also started to take off about that time. They were found only in select places before then. Today, U.S. brewers produce hundreds of different beers for mass distribution and thousands on a smaller scale. Oddly enough, this trend is mainly a North American phenomenon. Europeans used to make fun of American mass market beer but U.S. brewers surpassed the European brewers in breadth and quality a few years ago.
In Pat Conroy’s novel The Great Santini, set in the early 1960s, Marine aviators would routinely pack every square inch of their jets with Coors bottles whenever flying east.
Yeah, what was that about? Did the Coors parent company just not pay off the right people? Or did it have something to do with their manufacturing process or alcohol content or something?
The beer scene across the US is completely different than it was just 25 years ago.
In Wisconsin in 1987, for example, you might have found a bottle of Anchor Steam, Killian’s Red, or Pete’s Wicked Ale if you were in a larger city and the bar owner was adventurous.
5 years later, you could add Leinie Red and a couple of others to that list, along with Guinness and some other major imports appearing more commonly, but very rarely on tap.
Go forward another 5 years (1998) and now you begin to see Spotted Cow, national micros like Dogfish Head and Sierra Nevada on tap along with more obscure imports.
It was really only in the very late 90’s and early 00s that it became commonplace to get any beer you wanted from anywhere in the world.
The mystique of Coors was supposedly that it wasn’t pasteurized like other mass market beers, and so it would get skunky if it were shipped too far from Denver without being refrigerated (IIRC, the easternmost legitimate Coors distrbutor was supposed to be in Kansas City.)
I suspect the real answer is that Coors was simply a regional brewer and didn’t choose to expand to national distrubtion until competition forced it to.
To the OP, yes there are many more choices in Podunkville than there were 40 years ago.
The average liquor store in Baltimore, MD in the 1970s(not the midwest, I know, but it’s the locale I was in) had more or less the following beers in stock:
Budweiser
Miller High Life
Schlitz
Schmidt’s
Hamm’s
Rolling Rock
Carling Black Label
National Bohemian
National Premium
Schaeffer
Pabst Blue Ribbon
Ballantine
Arrow 77
American(this was a Baltimore company)
Heineken
Lowenbrau
Beck’s
There were a few large stores that had a few more imports. The variety in the run of the mill store is huge now compared to the 70s.
Yeah, even in Chicago, at your average grocery store even through the early 00s, you wouldn’t find anything but your typical imports and major craft brews like Sam Adams and Pete’s Wicked (at least that was the major craft brew at the time.) It really is only in the last seven or so years that I’ve noticed the micros trickle down to the Jewels and Dominicks (two local chains) in my neighborhood. Now, you’d be able to find all those at a good liquor store for quite some time, surely by the time I started drinking in the early 90s, I knew where to find craft brews. But I still had to know where to go. Any random liquor store wouldn’t do. And there’s still plenty of shops and bars in Chicago where you won’t find anything more adventurous than a Sam Adams. My local bar cum liquor store doesn’t have anything more exotic than Modelo or Dos Equis.
Not in the Midwest, but until about a decade ago, SC would not allow the sale of any beer containing more than 5% ABV. Now, I can find some craft beers and foreign beers containing up to 14% ABV. It is possible that other states had similar laws.
Prohibition decimated most of the smaller breweries in the market and the subsequent land grab post repeal meant the bigger players consolidated their power and shifted the American palate towards light lager style beers. It wasn’t until the 1980’s that American microbrewers rediscovered old traditions and expanded America’s notion fo what beer should taste like.
During WWII, the American breweries attenuated the beer with cheap rice. More recently, microbreweries sprung up, going back to malt and hops, with possibly some flavorings, and using different types of hops from all over the world. Some of these microbreweries have become national, so are no longer “microbreweries,” but craft beers.
I remember watching the St.Louis Blues on tv back in the early 80’s my brother and I thinking it was cool drinking store bought Labatt’s. A few months later or around the same time we bought our first can of Foster’s.
Growing up around St Louis any adults drinking beer from Milwaukee (Shlitz,PBR etc…) were looked at a little differently.
I got married(this time) in 1981. We had the rehersal dinner in our local German restaurant where you could get Dortmunder dark on draft. This was in Akron, OH., which had about a 225,000 population at the time. There was one other German place that had Dort dark on draft. Other than that, you drank PBR, Miller High Life, or any American beer(ugh!).
Ballantine? I didn’t know that was a real beer, I thought it was just a fake beer Martin Crane drank. Whatever happened to Lowenbrau? I remember my grandfather liking it in the late 90s, and it was available at Wal-Mart for only $3.44 a six pack of bottles. I think he liked it because he used to drink it in Germany…wasn’t too bad, glad I got to share a few with him, even though I was underage (for this country).
The UK doesn’t really count as Europe beer-wise. The UK brewing tradition is very different than most of continental Europe. That’s actually somewhat relevant to this thread because the British and European brewing traditions once existed side by side in the US, but the European style had pretty resoundingly won out long before prohibition came along.
The microbrewing renaissance we’re in now is in a lot of ways just the rediscovery of the British brewing style. Microbreweries in the US are dominated by ales, and though they’ll every now and again play around with lagers and other European styles, I can only think of a couple that really specialize in them. That’s in turn fed back to a sort of generalized ale renaissance that is also going on in the UK. It’s continental Europe where not much is happening beer-wise these days.
[QUOTE=Shalmanese]
Prohibition decimated most of the smaller breweries in the market and the subsequent land grab post repeal meant the bigger players consolidated their power and shifted the American palate towards light lager style beers.
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[QUOTE=barbitu8]
During WWII, the American breweries attenuated the beer with cheap rice.
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These sorts of beliefs are very common among some quarters in the beer community, but for the most part they’re not true. The sad truth is that the American-style lager became the dominant beer not because penny-pinching conglomerate brewers crammed it down our throats, but because people actually preferred the taste. The majority of American beer-drinkers still do. Mind boggling, but true. Contrary to popular belief, there isn’t anything about the American-style lager that’s especially conducive to macrobrewing-- it’s just that the market very definitively spoke in favor of that style.
How is this in any way true? Craft breweries are doing all sorts of styles from across Europe.
With the exception of a recent American affinity for ultra-hopped IPAs (more hopped than the Brits do, actually, and also on its way down), most craft brew styles actually reflect more traditional German and Belgian ale styles. In fact, you can’t stop hearing about Belgian style ales among the more snobbish of beer nerds stateside.
Not just the American market. It’s strange but mass produced American style lagers are large sellers across Europe (including the UK) and Asia.
I was going to say. In '96 I worked for a couple months at a high-end restaurant (with one Michelin star) in Scotland. After work, after spending the entire day making dishes like truffle & mushroom risotto, pan roasted grouse, foie gras and apple canneloni, etc., the chefs would sit down with a case of Budweiser. That was their beer of choice.
Like I said, they play around with them, but the big selling micros are mostly variations on pale ales or porters, which are both at least rooted in the British tradition.
Beer nerds like the Belgian style beers, but they’re not big sellers. Even New Belgium, which makes some awesome Belgian-style beer is mostly subsidized by the sales of their straightforward amber (pale) ale. And “German style ale”?
Now, to do some backpedaling, I will admit that I forgot about Belgium earlier and pretty meant the German-speaking countries and the Czech republic when I said “European.” I also forgot about hefeweizen, which is a central European style beer that is a staple of US microbreweries and so a bit of an exception to the rule.
