The American beer

What exactly is an American beer? I've been asking myself that question a lot the last few days. Is it simply a beer that was first made in America, or is it a beer that is better when made here than anywhere else? What about an old style with a new American twist; does that make it American or simply an imitation?

While the micro-brew industry is growing and expanding rapidly, our country is still most famous for its big brand brews: Budweiser, Miller and Coors. Which should really be rewritten as Budweiser-Inbev and MillerCoors. It is also fun pointing out that both of these breweries are not even American-owned companies anymore.

Bud Light is the top selling beer in the entire world, boasting over 1.3 billion dollars in sales last year in just retail environments. It's also a fairly bland, watery beverage with only the slightest semblance of beer taste. Is this American beer?

It isn't easy to paint an entire country with broad strokes from a single stereotype, but we already do it with food, and with beer. The British have their malty bitters and IPAs, the Germans have their bready lagers (light and dark) and the Belgians have their funky Farmhouse and Abbey beers. We're left holding the bag with a beer that is capitalism incarnate.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing; beer snobs like to sneer and jab at big name beers, mocking them for the weak tastes, but in reality these beers are harder to brew than any other on the planet. When you make a beer that is that light in flavor, body and color, any slight flaws or imperfections stand out like that 40-year-old guy in your Greek Civ lecture.

Thankfully for us there are people who are not satisfied with simply receiving a paycheck every week. Some breweries go above and beyond the expected, not just to sell good beer, but because it is truly what they want to do. Recently Dogfish Head and Sierra Nevada teamed up to do a beer called "Life and Limb," made with Sierra Nevada's own barley and maple syrup from the owner of Dogfish Head's family farm in Massachusetts. There is nothing about this beer that is practical in the least, and it personifies the true spirit of American brewing.

American brewers are never satisfied with what they are doing, and that is the true ideal of beer in this country. As a culture of brewers and beer drinkers we really are the new kids on the block; there are breweries in Germany that go back nearly 800 years. We don't have hundreds of years of tradition defining what goes into our beer. What we do have is people of every race, culture and creed with a sort of manifest destiny that hasn't decided to die off yet.

There are many styles of beers that have been altered (some may go as far as to say corrupted) by American brewers, bringing it in a new direction that generally involves a great deal of extra hops. American stout, pale ale, IPA, brown, barley wine and amber come from classic English beers, warped with extremely generous additions of American hops. If you've ever compared a Long Trail IPA (an English IPA) to say, a Stone IPA (American), the difference is pretty clear.

There are also a great deal of American brewers recreating Belgian Abbey and Farmhouse beers, but in this case the trend is much more natural, and many of these beers are made as closely as possible to the originals. Though you always get the few rebels who decide a Belgian triple just isn't big enough (I'm looking at you Weyerbacher and New Glarus).

American beer, just like its people, is an extreme melting pot of creativity, tradition, capitalism and an unnerving sense of complete disregard for reality. I don't think I'd have it any other way.

Until next time, sláinte!