Is that Chinese by any chance? I’ve never seen it here, but I see Budweiser everywhere. At home Blue is considered domestic, and it seems to be the popular choice (Michigan).
Nope. Oldest brewery in the U.S. 1829.
Heh. Yuengling made it down here to the south from the northeast a decade or so ago. It’s aight, but nothing much.
Small nitpick, but Red Hook is 32% owned by Anheiser-Busch. Sierra Nevada is the seventh-largest brewing company in the US. Anchor Steam is owned by an investment group. It might make more sense to say that you like ales, or even craft beers, rather than say you like microbrews: I wouldn’t call any of these microbrews.
I love yeungling, but can’t get it out here on the west coast. Everytime I go back to Pittsburgh to visit the parents, I feel I need to drink my weight in yuengling.
And by “love” I mean it is way better than bud but the same price. Sure there are better beers if you want to pay more.
Fair point. Maybe we are nit picking between when a microbrew becomes a craft ale?
I didn’t know that about Red Hook, muthafuckas. Craft beer it is and microbrew it ain’t
Sierra Nevada made the big leagues but it’s a start up, didn’t sell out, and bench marked pretty much 3 beers (pale ale, porter and stout) way back ~1980 when there was no real beer. I would disagree with you that they aren’t a microbrew, they are THE MICROBREW that made the big leagues.
Anchor Steam and the Fritz Maytag era (1965-2010) was most certainly a microbrew - again a really successful one. Again, iconic beers available at the dawn of the microbrew/craft/non-major post prohibition era.
My memory of Pittsburgh beer is Olde Frothingslosh - the pale, stale ale with the foam on the bottom!
Every Christmas from the Iron City Brewery.
Definitions vary and often mention attitude and attention to quality, but always say that microbreweries produce relatively small amounts-- 10,000 or 15,000 barrels per year. Anchor Steam probably hasn’t produced that little since the 80s. By the mid nineties I could buy it in a party store in small town Michigan.
I don’t count anything with national distribution as a microbrew, although they can be craft beers.
To me, a microbrew has a limited production run and local distribution.
And Yuengling is a perfectly serviceable lager. They just got distributed into New England in the last year or two, before that I needed to stock up when I visited my daughter in Pennsylvania.
Yeah, that’s kind of my feeling, although I’m not sure about the national distribution thing: my understanding at this point is that distribution networks are pretty sophisticated, and I can find really weird little beers in beer shops that are from all over the place.
The difference between “microbrew” and “craft beer” isn’t one of quality; they’re describing two different things about the beer.
That could get pretty messy in a canoe.
Last production figures were around 180,000 barrels. There are plans for a second location to up production to 680,000.
And just because I have few opportunities to be pedantic, it’s Anchor Brewery. Anchor Steam is their flagship product.
Coors was the cool beer in the 70’s. It was only distributed out west. People brought it back home on trips.
I drank it a parties. Michelob is the beer I prefer
My tastes change out of the blue.
In my 20s, I couldn’t get enough Heineken.
My 30s, it was mainly New Castle.
Now, in my early 40s, I love me some Sweet Water or Lagunita’s IPAs. In fact, almost any IPA will do.
Mmmmm… IPA…
I don’t know if Sweet Water is small enough to be a microbrewery–Wikipedia says it’s the 26th largest brewer by volume in the US–but damn are they ever delicious. They’re one of my treat beers. If you’re not from the Eastern US and ever visit here and see them on tap, give them a try.
It’s a German word.
OP drank Yuengling because they were somewhere near Pennsylvania or in the south (they make it down there as well). It’s all over Florida and IIRC NC. It’s pretty much impossible to find on the west coast. And as far as cheap beers go, it’s pretty good. My go-to cheap beer is Killian’s.
As far as macrobrews go, Budweiser = Missouri, Coors = Colorado, Miller = Wisconsin (though all have multiple bottling locatiosn), so there are local trends, but overall they can be found anywhere. I meant this relatively: even in Coors territory Bud is still almost or even more popular.
They’re basically marketing terms, but micro usually means <15k barrels/year, and craft gets tacked on to anything that’s not “American-style lager.” There is some contention whether Boston Beer (who make Samuel Adams) are considered such, as well as those like Goose Island, a microbrewery that got big and then was bought by AB InBev.
Which is the plot of Smokey and the Bandit.
Treat beer? Sweetwater? Well, I may end up sounding too snobby or douchey on this, but Sweetwater is my ‘well beer’ - when I want something relatively cheap that isn’t “high risk, high reward” (so to speak) but above average. You know, the Southeast’s Sam Adams.
I generally prefer other local beers (I live in the Atlanta metro area). For a local (well, somewhat, it’s from Athens, GA) with a more national footprint, I’d pick Terrapin.
Back in the late eighties, I worked in a fairly notorious bar in Athens, Georgia - not “hip music scene” notorious, “biker trash and strippers and our bouncer got arrested for murder” notorious. We had PBR in the can and the bottle. At that time, that’s how a relative outsider could tell that it was a very large dive bar. I was a bit amused when Pabst became the choice of hipsters.
I think that craft brewing has probably made beer more accessible and more acceptable across generations, but it has also polarized beer drinkers. The younger group might not be caught dead chugging a Budweiser after a hot evening of yard work, because that’s such an average beer. Perhaps the older folks scoff at the notion of an $8 draft with notes of chocolate and cherries. I’m happy being middle aged: a nice cold mass brewed lager is just the thing after I’ve put away the lawn mower. And I love hitting the local brewery to taste the latest experiment if I’m having a night out.
(And Yuengling gives me a headache. It’s the damnedest thing.)
No problem. Their 420 pale just does me exactly right sometimes, but it’s pretty expensive here compared to a local brewery (Highland Gaelic Ale is local, cheaper, and just as tasty), so I don’t get it very often.
It’s a “treat beer” not in the sense that it’s something wildly gourmet, but in the sense that it’s relatively expensive compared to locals, and so I don’t buy it very often.
I’m not quite sure what Sam Adams is besides marketing. They 100% contract out the brewing (don’t have their own brewery) and marketed the hell out of being the only American brewed beer in compliance with The Reinheitsgebot, sometimes called the “German Beer Purity Law” in English.
Call me contradicted, but Anchor Steam was the great real beer I very occasionally had starting as a University freshman when I could actually afford a bottle. I’ll concede it’s too big now to be a microbrew, but I also love the fact that Maytag heir Fritz Maytag decided to do something productive with his inheritance. 
This is unequivocally false.
The Boston Beer Company (at 4 million BBLs per year) is certainly not a micro, but they are a Brewers Association Craft Brewer member. I’m not saying that Sam Adams is the top of the mark in craft brewing but Jim Koch is a pioneer of the industry and labeling BBC a marketing firm is about as unfair an accusation as you can make. Especially when you couple it with the “fact” that they are a 100% contract brewer, which is almost the exact opposite of the truth.
BBC still employs some contract manufacturing but the majority of their product is produced in their own PA and OH based breweries. You can like their products or dislike their products but very few will argue that as a company, they are not committed to producing high quality beers and continued development of new recipes. I’m not sure if Jim Koch killed your Paw or if you have some other reason to dislike him or the billion dollar company he built but when it comes to beer, he is no poser.