White With Foam

I wanted to write something patriotic for my next installment, and anticipation of the weekend gave me the perfect subject:

Beer.

Fact is, after decades of watery, cheap-grained, hop-deficient mediocrity, some of the best malt beverages on the planet are now Born in the USA.

I first considered writing about this a long time ago, when some reverse-snob columnist whose name and paper I’ve long since forgotten took a shot at beer snots and their (our) disdain for mass-produced swill in favor of “fancy imported micro-brews.”

What a nitwit. Microbrews are (a) mostly domestic, and (b) not hyphenated, and most aren’t especially fancy. In fact, the rise of microbreweries is a profoundly American story – the triumph of incentive, free enterprise and the readiness to fill an almost empty market niche.

A friend of mine who is a home brewer – a damn good one, I might add – gave me an interesting short course in the history of American brewing. According to his account, American breweries before Prohibition made beer pretty much the way it had always been made, especially German and Austrian lagers. The familiar names of American brewers – Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, Pabst – were the names of European families that brought Old World brewing arts and standards to the U.S.

With the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933, the demand for (legal) suds was so huge and enthusiastic that American brewers soon figured out that they could cut back on expenses – especially hops, the costliest ingredient in brewing -- without hurting consumption.

(The closest contemporary parallel I can think of is the Great “Light” Beer Scam – a now decades-long running con by which brewers water down beer and sell it at the same price.)

Big-volume imports like Heineken, Bass Ale and Guinness provided limited alternatives, and at premium prices. You didn’t have to be a Pat Buchanan-type economic xenophobe to wish for more and better domestic choices.

Enter the American entrepreneurial spirit – small regional breweries that made batches of really good, well-crafted lagers, light and dark ales, porters, stouts. Some grew into major-market competitors like Samuel Adams; others stayed regional with relatively modest, but extremely profitable, volume.

The results have been every free-market apostle’s best argument: A big enough variety of brews to satisfy every taste, and enough competition to curb the prices of domestics and imports alike. Even the major brewers, whose post-Prohibition corner-cutting created the niche that the micros rushed in to fill, now produce specialty products to compete with the upstarts encroaching on their profits.

A great American named Benjamin Franklin famously said something to the effect that “Beer is God’s way of showing he loves us and wants to see us happy.”

So hoist the cold one of your choice – even, if your taste buds are so tragically atrophied, a “light.” It’s the American Way.

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