American breweries that make beers with wild yeasts tend to take a somewhat different approach to those beers than the Belgians. Beeradvocate has a style listed called American Sour/Wild Ale. Some excellent ones from there are Russian River’s line of barrel-aged sours (Supplication, Consecration, Sanctification) and Ithaca Brewing Company’s Brute.
Top 100 reviewed beers in Beer Advocate for reference sakes…
I’m partial to Stone and Deschuttes myself. but would always try to find a beer on the list to try out…and VERY, VERY seldom am I dissapointed…
And here’s the ratebeer.com list for comparison. Also, best brewers. Note the top three are Midwest beers. 
That said, take that all with a HUGE grain of salt. This and Beer Advocate are primarily American sites, and naturally the ratings will skew towards American “beer afficianado” tastes, which is generally what I would classify as an aggressive palate. (Although I think that is slowly changing). Somewhat better would be the rankings of beers by category, but that is still going to be skewed to American tastes.
It’s kind of interesting to see what beers tasters of other cultural backgrounds find to be “the best.” For example, Michael Jackson (who was a leading beer and whisky reviewer in the UK until he passed away in 2007), declared that Goose Island IPA “may just be the best beer in the world.” This absolutely floored me. I don’t even think it’s one of the top 10 beers from that brewery, much less the “best in the world.” But I totally see where he’s coming from. Goose Island’s IPA is hopped with a mix of English and American hops, is a good bit more balanced than American style IPAs (which have a more aggressive West Coast hop nose to them), has reasonable alcoholic content without going overboard (5.9%). It’s got balance and subtleness and would be more familiar and accessible to a British palate.
lol
Look, we get it, Americans have stopped drinking pasteurised cow’s piss and resurrected their brewing industry after Prohibition and mass market beer decimated it, but please tone down the rhetoric. The best beer in the world? Seriously? How many German, Belgian, Dutch and British beers have you actually tried, OP?
Not just that, a good percentage of the American reviews are reviewing draught beers from their local pubs and bars compared to European beers being imported in bottles from halfway around the world. Hell, the third review of Pliny the Younger is some guy reviewing the beer after having tasted it at the brewery.
Yeah guys, it’s completely fucking ridiculous that a gigantic country with a huge craft brewing culture would have the best beer in the world. Clearly only countries that are tiny and have been doing the same thing since before America existed can make the best beer in the world, for no reason at all. Dream on.
This again? Look the EU has 500 Million population, thats 200 Million MORE than the US, and yeah in many of those countries theres local brewing traditions going back hundreds of years. There’s 178 Breweries just in Belgium, and many of them are microbreweries:
Beer in Belgium - Wikipedia.
Add in Germany, there’s 1300 Breweries and another 5000 types of beer, then add Czech, then all the rest of the “tiny countries”. Theres also been a craft beer / microbrewery explosion in europe since 2000 in many countries.
But of course anything the US starts to do semi-decently they are automatically “the best in the world” at… meh
Nobody has said it’s automatically the best, btw. There have been, however, several people in this thread that dismiss the notion out of hand.
Shit, next you’ll be telling me that American wine can compete with Bordeaux. HAH! The French have been making wine forever…
The OP claims the US makes the best beer just because there’s now lots of microbreweries as far as I can tell. However they seem entirely ignorant of what exists outside the US and the fact that other countries have also had “craft beer” explosions in the last few years as well.
The internet makes it much easier for small breweries to market themselves and gain a cult following, and thats true everywhere, not just in the US.
Yeah, Germany is crazy with the amount of breweries, but a bit anamolous. According to this, Germany has 1250 breweries, four times more than all the EU nations combined. That would give the EU about 1500 breweries. The US has something along the lines of 1700 breweries in 2010, for comparison.
Just throwing some numbers out there for perspective.
Per capita, the US is in 6th, behind Belgium, Germany, Austria, New Zealand, and the UK. Those are 2009 numbers, and don’t exactly align with the numbers stated above (for instance, that site has Germany having 940 breweries, and the US with 1,480).
Updated numbers for the US in 2011. “1,927 breweries operating for some or all of 2011, as of November 2011.”
But quality, not quantity, and all that …
Then you are deliberately misreading that.
Even if that’s what the OP said , it would not be declaring the US the best just because. Compare that to the haters in this thread…
I’m not sure that German claim that they have four times as many as the rest of the EU is right. The UK has 700 Breweries, so that makes 2200 just with Germany, Belgium and the UK.
The US is not even going to try to compete with Germany on classic pilsners. The style has been devalued by association with mass-market corn-and-rice beers, and those who crave Spaten or Paulaner Pils will usually just buy that.
However, if you’re in the mood for something like what you might have tasted in many US cities pre-Prohibition, try Boulevard Pilsner. More body and bite than any lawnmower beer. But be forewarned, Boulevard is shy of promoting or distributing it - the hop snobbery runs deep.
Good beer is good beer, regardless where it comes from. You can get amazing beer in both Europe and the US these days.
For another perspective to the claims in this thread that tradition necessarily equals better beer, Slate recently had an article which claimed that Germany’s historic beer system is actually starting to hurt the quality of German beer.
I did think that was a little odd, myself. Maybe they meant “Continental Europe.”
I have. I enjoy it, but I find it to be a bit one-dimensional a lot of the time. I didn’t list New Belgium simply because they don’t produce nearly as many sour beers as the other two breweries I mentioned.
A small brewery that has done several nice sours in the past few years is Jackie O’s brewpub in Athens, Ohio.
Also, since someone mentioned pilsners–I’ll throw out Sam Adams Noble Pils and Victory Prima Pils as two very good American versions. The Prima is one of my go-to summer beers every year.
I totally agree with this, especially with Prima Pils. Sam Adams is, IMHO, an underrated American brewery. I do have a soft spot for them, as they were my stepping stone into craft brews, but their flagship lager is still perhaps my favorite American lager, as ubiquitous as it may be. That said, it seems like the quality varies quite a lot from draft to draft. Their Noble Pils is a fine product, too. However, as great as Prima Pils and Noble Pils are, they feel like they should almost be in a separate category to me than Euro pilseners. I don’t know what it is about them, but it’s like the grain bill/the malt backbone is substantially different. A good Czech pilsner just has a chewiness and body to it that the American versions I’ve had seem to lack.
Have you tried the pilseners from Sudwerk, in Davis, CA? I found their distinguishing characteristics to be their body and heft, very atypical of other American pilseners I’ve tried, like the Victory and Sam Adams you’ve mentioned. I didn’t think that they tasted like Staropramen or Urquell—I remember that, at least in E. Germany and Prague, those Czech beers having a crispness and balance that I feel most U.S. versions don’t have—but they certainly are interesting beers that are well worth your time.
I haven’t been able to find them anywhere but in CA, unfortunately. I’m still kicking myself for not getting a few six-packs of them, the last time I drove to CA.
[QUOTE=coremelt]
I’m not sure that German claim that they have four times as many as the rest of the EU is right. The UK has 700 Breweries, so that makes 2200 just with Germany, Belgium and the UK.
[/quote]
Closer to 800 according to Camra. 767 as of September 2010.
“Haters”? lol. The OP’s claim is just another example of how America can’t be just mundane, or first amongst equals, at anything. It’s either claimed to be the best or the worst at everything. It gets tedious quickly, especially when it’s coupled with the usual butthurt responses given to anybody who dares to question the claims made, or point out that they’re maybe a bit exaggerated.
Still yet to hear back from the OP as to how many non-American brews he’s tasted in order to even feel comfortable making the claim he made, though. Bated breath and all that.
america…fuck yeah!