No doubt. Even a single terrible beer is too much terrible beer. However, I think your experience must be pretty limited:
“A couple”? Just from my hometown, we’ve got:
-Highlands Brewing, which does an amazing mocha stout;
-Asheville Pizza and Brewing, whose Shiva IPA is a floral delight;
-Green Man Brewing, whose golden ale was our wedding beer;
-Pisgah Brewing, with a lovely organic malty pale ale;
-Craggy Brewing, specializing in mad-scientist blends like an “Antebellum Ale” brewed with molasses, ginger, and spruce tips (it’s fantastic); and
-Several other breweries whose products I’m less familiar with: Oyster House, Wedge, Lexington Avenue Brewery, Altamont, Southern Appalachian Brewery, etc.
If you’ve only tried “a couple” of “decent” US beers, I can’t believe you’ve looked too hard. What’s going on in the beer world these days is amazing; the US is in something of a golden age for beer.
Sure, there are certain styles being done in Europe that don’t, I believe, have their equal in the US: Belgian ales in particular haven’t been well-replicated here, I think. And if that’s your love, then have at it: you’ll want to stick with the European brews.
But there’s a plethora of phenomenal beer in the US now. Tell us your style, and we can recommend a beer for you that will knock your socks off.
I used to assume all American beer uniformly sucked. Then I went to America.
I refined my opinion: American beer sold out of a dive bar in the middle of nowhere with a Jagermeister bottle as a lampshade sucks (cool bar otherwise, though).
These days, I’m willing to believe that somewhere out there is an American beer for me, to rank alongside Adnams’ Gunhill, Brewdog’s Trashy Blonde, Freeminer’s Slaughter Porter, Two Towers’ Mott Street Mild, Wooden Hand’s Pirate Gold or Beartown’s Bruins Ruin. The problem is availability. There are a few pubs near me which stock bottled American beers, but so far I’ve had no luck, and at up to four quid a bottle for less than a pint I’m not that inclined to experiment. I’d love to go to an American beer festival, though, as long as it was actually in America; I agree with the fact that beer doesn’t travel well.
I dismiss anybody’s opinions about beer if they think English beer is served warm, though, as we’re clearly drinking beer for different reasons. It’s not even true; a proper British real ale is cellar temperature, about 14 degrees centigrade. Even in an English summer, that’s not room temperature
One of the greatest advocates and writers of beer, Englishman Michael Jackson, frequently wrote about the virtues of American Beer, especially impressed with the experimentation and creativity.
And the best beer in the world is brewed just 2 hours from me, Pliny the Elder, out of Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa, CA
…an American, as near as I can tell. Gotta love the land of immigrants! To the extent that we’ve got a genius, the willingness to welcome crazy Russian brewers and make them our own is a big part of it.
Why do so many American’s prefer beer that sucks? And I don’t know why.
But, there are plenty of good American beers, they just don’t sell very well. Yuengling is currently my favorite mass-market American beer, I prefer the Black and Tan or Porter, and stay away from the Lite. And microbreweries like Red Oak, Lone Star, and Big Boss, around where I live, produce many fine beers in my opinion.
Some German beers are certainly pasteurized. Any Beck’s you drink will be pasteurized.
The big American beers (Bud, Miller, Coors) will be pasteurized. Craft beers will tend not to be pasteurized but it depends on the brewer. For example, Sam Adams in kegs is not pasteurized while the bottled stuff is. None of Sierra Nevada’s stuff is pasteurized.
There’s some debate about how much it affects the flavor (which leans towards leaving beer unpasteurized), but there’s little doubt you can produce a tasty brew that’s pasteurized and some foul swill that’s unpasteurized.
He even called Goose Island Brewing’s IPA perhaps the best IPA he’s ever tasted, brewed right here in Chicago, Illinois. I personally do not agree, but I can see why, as the Goose Island style of the straight IPA is more towards an English style IPA than the hop bombs American IPAs tend to be.
If you like beer, there’s really few other places in the world better to be than metropolitan areas in America right now. Of course, Belgium will remain a beer mecca, and for certain particular styles, you might enjoy the UK, Germany, Czech Republic, etc. Scandinavian countries are producing some fun and interesting brews, too, experiencing the same sort of renaissance and creativity in brewing that has happened in America over the last 20 years.
If you think that America is only just starting to make good beer, you haven’t been paying attention. The craft brew revolution, in my estimation, really started happening in the early 90s. We drank a lot of craft brews in college, in the mid-90s, and they were of varying quality. By the 2000s, though, the average quality had reached a high level. What’s happened in the past 5 years or so is the availability of these beers has spread such that bars and stores that would normally stock the BudMillCoors type of beers now usually have at least a selection of the biggest craft beers. I’ve been amazed, as the local blue-collar working class neighborhood liquor store that my family has been going to since I was 4 years old now has among the largest selection of craft beers in Chicago. It stuns me to see how far brewing has come.
Some people like light beer…that said, American lagers are brewed light because people drink them cold.A heavier beer tastes better when not as cold . Most American lagers are made with good quality ingredients…except for the very light ones (Bud uses rice and corn to produce a lighter brew); but as I say, the brewers make what people buy…if you like a more flavorful beer, there are plenty of micro breweries around.
The worst tasting beers I have had have been cheap European brands, from countries where beer isn’t all that big (like Greece, France, Spain).
I disagree somewhat… after spending a lot of time in Japan and developing a taste for Kirin, Asahi, etc., I figured that I’d be able to drink the American macrolagers. Nope, I still found them nearly undrinkable.
Currently it’s 101 degrees outside in Salt Lake City, and to me, a nice cold Old Style, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Budweiser or even Coors sounds better than a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or Goose Island IPA does.
(and I really like both Sierra Nevada and Goose Island’s brews under the right circumstances, but in this brutally hot weather, for me, a cheap, cold, easy finishing brew is a better call than most of the typical American microbrews, too many of which are way too heavy and filling to want more than one or two of in a single sitting. Right now I could drink an entire 6-pack of PBR and not feel overly full or particularly intoxicated.)
What really sucks is washing down English food with American beer. Bangers and mash, spotted dick, blood pudding…how do you people survive on that garbage over there?
You’re talking out of your ass… from what I understand via homebrewing and doing a lot of research is that the big boys brew beer just fine- they have tighter quality controls, more analytical testing and better process control than the microbrews.
Plus, their brewers are flat out GOOD at what they do. They can produce extremely light colored lagers consistently over thousands of batches and millions of barrels. That’s freaking hard to do. Most smaller breweries are happy if their batches taste more or less the same from one to the next, while the big boys are wanting their batches to taste the same as they have for 20 years.
On top of that, they are trying to be low-cost, so they’re going to use the cheapest (or near cheapest) ingredients available, which just so happen to be agricultural commodities like corn, rice, malted barley. They probably don’t cheap out too much on hops; they’re kind of important to the beer’s flavor.
All that being said, they make a super-consistent, exquisitely crafted cheap light lager, and you don’t like that style.
They could very easily, if the mood struck them, make super-consistent, exquisitely crafted ales, or whatever they want. Their market niche is mass-market cheap light lagers, so that’s what they brew.
(on an aside, I’d love to see Budweiser, Miller or Coors come out with a limited edition throwback version of their 1880s era recipes; what now is called a “Classic American Pilsner”)
What’s interesting is that the craft brews are filtering out to the hinterland, especially in the west. You can saunter up the saloon in any tiny town pretty much from the eastern edge of the Rockies on to the Pacific and these days expect to at least have a couple of the bigger regional craft brews in the bottle, if not on tap. Microbreweries are getting very common in the rural west, too-- my state of Montana has less than a million people, but has (last time I checked) 26 breweries, a lot of them in towns with four-digit populations.
