It’s easy to see the technological component in so much of what’s going on in our world, but one can’t excuse the late arrival of craft brewing (i.e., the arrival of good beer in the US) based on a need to wait for technology. As soon as it was legal in the US to brew full-alcohol beer again (Prohibition repealed on December 5, 1933), brewers were free to make the good stuff.
For the most part, they didn’t choose to do so. Here are some milestones:
• Sierra Nevada brews its first batch of Pale Ale in November 1980. Cite. That is the first cite I have for a genuinely great beer being brewed in the US.
• The Boston Beer Company (Sam Adams) was founded in 1984. Cite. Although considered a pretty mediocre beer at best in today’s brewing world, this was many Americans taste of “real beer.” I started drinking in the early 90s, and it was the first “craft beer” I had until 1998.
• Goose Island got its start in Chicago 1988, but its big brewery opened in 1995. Cite. For Midwesterners like myself, this was one of the first craft beers after Sam Adams to become available in liquor stores and supermarkets. My first IPA, in 1998, was a Goose. Today, of course, beer snobs totally dismiss Goose Island, but I tried their IPA again recently, and it’s decent.
So let’s go back in time to 1998. I had come back from a job in Japan to attend grad school. By way of aside, craft brewing in Japan got its start in 1994: a law requiring brewing companies to produce 2,000,000 liters a year was reduced to 60,000. Cite (Japanese). I visited my first Japanese brewpub in 2000. It’s not that big a thing over there. I put this detail in here because I’d like you to feel free to talk about the history of good beer in your own country.
So, it’s 1998, and you go into a liquor store in the Chicago area. It’s still pretty bleak! You have Sam Adams, Goose Island, Pete’s Wicked Ale (RIP), and maybe a few other things that I don’t remember because I still wasn’t into it all that much. Oh, I just remembered one: Anchor Steam Beer and Anchor Porter. Very good stuff (I’m not sure when Anchor’s beer started to be good or if it always was good, so feel free to fill in that bit of history). In New York (where I spent a bunch of my summer in 1999 during my internship), options were not radically different IIRC. The beer of choice to buy from the liquor store there was Brooklyn Lager, a good beer. A decent bar typically had a craft brew or two on tap.
Feel free to correct or add to the history above, but the point is that the real explosion in craft beer has happened since 2000, in the blink of an eye. Returning to my original question: Why? Why didn’t people in 1950 get into delicious IPAs and Belgians and porters. I think the answer is really quite simple: tastes in food and drink at the time were abysmal.
If you grew up in the 70s and 80s (or earlier), there’s one thing you’re bound to remember: bad TV commercials for really, really bad beer. These commercials were big! The penetrated popular culture. I remember sitting on the gym bleachers in grade school during an assembly, and the two sides spontaneously broke out into a chant of “Tastes great!” vs. “Less filling!” What was that for, Miller Lite? Ugh.
But wait, the notion of a “premium” beer did exist! Things like Lowenbrau (hahaha) and Michelob (hahahahahahaha!). If you were drinking that stuff instead of Schlitz, you were drinking fancy, lemme tell ya! Now here’s the thing about those beers and anything else that tried to be premium at the time: to lovers of real beer today, they would just taste like water. It’s not as though companies at the time were trying to do real beer and failing; they just weren’t trying at all.
You know how bad beer was in the 70s? The (good) megahit movie Smokey and the Bandit was all about smuggling Coors beer east of the Mississippi River. People used to bring Coors back from trips and whatnot and sell it–cuz it was just so rare and so good! And when Coors finally began to be distributed nationwide sometime in the 80s, it was a huge deal. All for beer that would not be considered any different from any other thin, nothing beer today.
Beer in the US was so bad that people with any kind of taste would drink imports, but the imports were also little more than carbonated water. For the longest time, Heineken was considered some kind of special thing!
And if you grew up in the 70s and 80s, you know that food culture just kind of sucked, and unless your mom was Chinese or something, you were probably eating terrible food a lot of the time. Let’s face it: food culture just absolutely sucked, and the advertising that supported it was dumb as hell. Let’s not even talk about 80s wine cooler ads, m’kay?
I’m sure people a lot more knowledgeable than I will say much more interesting things, so I’ll let you get to it. But for young people reading now, we truly are blessed to have the craft brew culture that has popped up. Even in a mid-size city like Indianapolis (where I live), it’s an embarrassment of riches in terms of local brewing; plus, we have restaurants with magnificent taps from all over the country. I’m grateful.
