TL; DR version: Hipsters?
That article has basically been debunked. The bill Carter signed created a tax exemption for home brewing, and did not involve commercial craft beer.
Supposedly, though, along similar lines, craft beer production was deregulated in several states, starting around that time and running through the '80s. I have not seen specific state legislation substantiating this claim, however.
It further occurs to me that wineries are still fighting against state laws preventing the sale of wine across state lines, and brewers may have had to overcome similar restrictions in order to make craft beer viable. Smokey and the Bandit may have involved cheap crappy lager, but one larger point of the movie is that states have a lot of power to stop out-of-state beers from moving in.
It certainly could not have helped. Is there evidence, however, that beer before Prohibition was amazing? A lot of the local brewing came down to the fact that beer was harder to ship than other stuff, like hard liquor. It’s not as though they were shipping IPAs all over the place. Still, somebody somewhere was probably doing something right.
I don’t think the cause and effect is correct here, quite. From looking at old restaurant menus and cookbooks, my impression is that fancy restaurant food was based on European dining: you had terrapin soup and all that jazz. Home cooking, on the other hand, was very simple but also in what we would consider today good taste. The rise of consumer culture and prosperity didn’t cause a coarsening of American taste per se, IMHO. Rather, you had a big population who was moving from these very simple tastes to something more sophisticated, and it was a very clumsy journey. They were reaching for that fancy European ideal but making a hash of it, pun intended. Meanwhile, you had companies trying to flog every type of packaged food, resulting in the Jell-O abominations. So instead of a real European aspic, you had housewives encouraged to put tuna in lime Jell-O and call it a day.
So I don’t think America’s palate was ruined; I think it was primitive before WWII and it had to go through several decades of growing pains. Hell, I lived through part of them. My mom’s cooking in the 70s was absolutely awful.
VIZ magazine (of England) publishes an excellent comic series entitled “Real Ale Twats.” Check it out to see the stereotype illustrated.
http://viz.co.uk/category/cartoons/strip-cartoons/real-ale-twats/
omg lol!
Well, the bearded ones did create one of the world’s greatest successful community struggles in CAMRA — not unlike Syndicalists in early 20th century Spain.
Apparently the big breweries were crushing the little guys in the '60s, so a tiny radical group got together in a pub in County Kerry in 1971 and started campaigning for Real Ale.
However, small craft ales/beers never wholly died in the British Isles, they just weren’t sold in brewery-owned pubs.
The copper bosses killed you, Joe
They shot you, Joe, says I
Takes more than guns to kill a man
Says Joe, I didn’t die
Says Joe, I didn’t die
Also back before the Brewery mergers which created the Giants on Britain ( it’s even worse now, with dull morose capitalism accumulating every independent as soon as possible with greed-filled drear, until you end up with Diageo, Pernod, Suntory and the late Seagrams of Canada ) although they were already so rich the Peerage was starting to become known as the Beerage, since so many wretched little businessmen were starting to get ennobled, the average pub owner would often be accused of ‘cellar work’, gentling the taste along with unorthodox and imaginative craft.
Not that I care about any of these things: it all tastes like dishwater anyway.
Over here in Germany, the received wisdom always was that American and British beer wasn’t quite good enough to water your plants. Imagine my shock now when I find myself sailing right past the good old German brews, going instead for some British IPA!
Seriously, while we still have a strong traditional beer culture over here, I think in terms of craft beers—by which I mainly mean, willingness to try new things, experiment with flavors and so on—Germany’s lagging behind the curve a bit. (That’s not to say there aren’t many fine craft beers over here, too—but it seems to me that it hasn’t quite caught on, although you already see a couple of the big breweries trying to get in on the trend.)
I realize I have tendency to look at things through the prism of television, but there was an episode of ***The Untouchables *** (1959) that dealt with this issue. John Banner (aka Sgt Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes) played a traditional German brewmaster who had emigrated to America; he lamented to Eliot Ness how brewing was a respected and time-honored art in Germany, and Prohibition was now forcing him either to produce swill or submit to the demands of organized crime.
German tradition can be a selling point elsewhere. Beck’s beer used to (and perhaps still does) advertise itself in the US by saying that it complied with the German purity law of 1516, which meant that it could have only four ingredients: water, barley malt, hops, and yeast.
Don’t forget to credit the Great Depression. That’s when my grandparents grew up, and they got used to eating, basically, what they could get. And it was bland, bland, bland. Then they just got used to it, and kept eating that way, and taught it to their baby-boomer kids, who passed it on to me.
Which is why I became a professional cook, because I hate bland food.
Hmmmn. The only explanation I can have is that you lived in a different area of the uk in the 80’s than I did. Real Ale did not take off in the US, it’s been here in the UK and alive for a long long time. You needed to rename it for the hipsters and millenials to drink it, but indeed, they’ve lost something with this bizarre Need to chill it (Note: you chill things which don’t taste so nice, if it is something you want to taste the details of, you don’t, You chill lager because, erm, it’s not nice).
I lived in the south east in the 80’s, Reading specifically, and while there were places which had generic bitters (Courage, Morlands), there were also plenty with good real ale brewed well. However, other parts of the uk, such as Glasgow, had the case of bars with 9 different lagers and no real ale, and it wasn’t so good for real ale in the midlands either. So talking about the UK in that sense, can be quite varied. London for instance has had good real ale available somewhere for a long time, but a tourist might not have been aware of it from the normal bars.
It does make shudder over here when they call it craft. But the little angels seem to need to feel different from their dads.
BTW, the real ale twats from viz does have some truth. There is a subset of drinkers, almost like train spotters who take taster notes around, and have to try every kind of real ale and rate them. They also tend to favour the stronger ones…
Which reminds me, I’ve always had an issue when drinking “craft beer” in the US, partially by the lack of ABV details available often in a number of places (California, Oregon, Washington), and almost macho need to brew it very strong. A typical ale over here is in the 4-5% range. The crazy juice from 5% onwards (ok some will favour the 5%ish), but in the US you’ll order a nice IPA and find its 7.5% because you feel woozy and you find out the percentage because you have to look it up on the internet. In a country which is litigation prone, I’m surprised such percentages aren’t show openly and freely…
A generation of kids who grew up on ketchup and chocolate milk got old enough to drink and demanded something thick, syrupy and brown.
Let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that the middle class drinks bourbon, wine, etc. and considers beer to be the haven of the Appalachian hillbilly, along with pickup trucks and mullets.
Now let’s say that you’re a business executive and you’re being told, “Oh yeah, man, there’s all these great things they’re doing with the mullet in Switzerland that are really going to revolutionize the hair industry. You start launching those products here and it’s going to be a hundred million dollar industry!” Do you buy into this argument? Probably not, because mullet.
I would venture to guess that this was the problem that beer had. There was no desire for a better beer, because beer wasn’t a thing that was desirable. If you wanted something better than a beer, you bought some wine or a “real” drink.
Carter may not have directly affected the craft brewery movement, but since about 90% of all craft brewers got their start as home-brewers, his legalization of home-brewing provided the next few generations of brewers willing to push the envelope and brew decent beers.
I can’t remember the last time I ordered a beer anywhere in the US (let’s see, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, Texas, Arizona, California, Oregon recently) that did not have the ABV clearly listed, either on the beer menu or on the chalk board. One place even lists ABV for Coors Light (as “pi” percent).
And if you can’t handle the Imperial IPAs, I suggest you stay away from the Belgian Quads :eek:…
This sure sounds like the most logical explanation to me. Now to start work on the “Jimmy Carter 1978 Peanut Stout”…
Good analogy! The concept of beer was locked into something really limited and uninspiring, yet the market was also huge and dominated by big, dumb companies. It was therefore doubly unattractive to anyone who wanted to do something different: you’d have to radically change people’s perceptions while fighting the big guys. The only people willing to change this were those who, at least at first, were doing it more for love than for money.
The funny thing is that the only brewery I’ve seen not but the ABV on bottles is Three Floyds here in Indiana (one of the world’s best!), and it seems they used to do so but stopped for some reason. At the brewpub, they do put the ABV up on the chalkboard and on the menu. Maybe I’ll ask the bartender what’s up with that the next time I go there…
Union Brewing Co. in Carmel, Indiana, makes mostly cask beers served with natural carbonation and at little below room temperature. So it’s quite old school. Apparently a lot of UKers favor the pub for this reason.
I object to the slam on lagers. Dunno about the UK but brewpubs here are making quite a few nice ones these days. 
As an Australian, I see what’s happening here as a market correction allowed by Technology.
We used to have a number of different breweries back in the day, never had prohibition to get in the road.
Over decades from the 70’s and 80’s the big breweries bought out the smaller ones. Basically destroyed the domestic competition so the range of offerings were reduced to only really 2 main companies.
With the advent of technology that allows micro breweries to be able to be done without spending a fortune, the micro brewery (AKA craft beer) market has been building and thriving for 10 years or more.
I was actually impressed at the range of different beers available in the USA when I was there on holidays very recently.
The Main St Station brewery in Las Vegas does some very nice beers. I did the taster rack of 6 different beers.
Also, the Blonde in Ma’Kai in Santa Monica (the beer, not the girl behind the bar) was very tasty too. OK, the girl was pretty good too. :o