Show me an American micro which can do a very good Pils, Hefeweizen, and Dunkel.

I found few very good breweries in the USA and all their brew masters actually studied in Austria beer making for years.

90% of what you can find in the USA is nothing more than the level of home brewing skill both mass production or micro.

I just bought a Leavenworth Eightmile Alt Apline Style Ale.
The alps dont have ales, we do not Britain does. And an Alt is not an API – which it actually only is again.

They also have a Hefeweizen and Pilz and I would not be surprised in case all those are as well API with different flavors but not REAL beers.

American beer makers have to learn their trade.
I am sorry Americans if you want to experience real beer get out of your Chinese world of being the center and move to Europe. Heck even China makes better blond beers today.

IT IS difficult to find anything outside the standard shit of bud/lt, miller, busch and natty ass. At convenience stores. If i must buy piss, i am quite the fan of good old PBR. At least i can taste it. Still, hard to find. So, to the grocery store it is, rather than the gas station. I love that the micros are making a dent in the market. Perhaps if they weren’t so proud of them…?

It should not cost as much or more for American brews as it does for imports. The “they are small and it costs more to produce” arguments are shit as well. No one can call Boston Beer a micro anymore, nor can you Sierra Nevada or Red Hook. These are big name companies, with same big name corporate greed. You want your products to take off? Price it comparably to domestic beers, because that is what they are. Oh, but right now they are enjoying steady growth from their target market, and if they ever do become mainstream, will still be overpriced and feel justified about it.

One can only hope that the rapid influx of so many more micros nationwide will provide enough competition to make the prices reasonable. Hope. Sadly, most of them are coming right out of the gate ridiculously priced as well. A damn shame.

Some of these micros, by the way, i love. Big fan of both Red Hook And Sierra, as well as Sam Adams, Sweetwater, Terrapin etc. Too many to name, not to mention import stuff. I have brewed at home for years, and have friends who work in various breweries around here. I would love to see real beer come back in this country. There will always beer beer chugging buffoons, and sometimes i will join their proud ranks, but that is not enjoying beer. Let them keep buying the cheap shit. There are also thousands of people a day who go into the store not decided yet on what they are going to buy. Those are the customers being lost. Studies have proven (and anyone with a brain admits) that, when undecided, the first and most effective decision maker is price. It’s our default setting. Fix it, and they won’t be able to make the shit fast enough to keep it on the shelves. Then maybe you can justify your exorbitant fee.

One big missing piece is that during the depression, and even more so during WWII, American brewers did not have access to good grains. Prohibition was lifted in 1932. So it took a couple of years to get the breweries working at top notch. But, in the depression, farmers were struggling to get back up on there feet and were not delivering quality grains. By the time they had their harvests back up to good quality, the war set in and all high quality grains went to the front lines.

So, the brewers made due with what they could get. The GI’s got used to this beer that was shipped over to there camps in Europe and Hawaii, came back home, and continued drinking Miller, Schlitz, and Bud. Back home, it was said that drinking American beer was patriotic, even if the flavor was terrible. Americans’ palates were taught that this was good stuff. After the war, advertising kicked in. The sky was the limit for light American lager to boom.

Hope this helps.

The previous posters are more or less correct that craft beer has seen a huge resurgence as of late mainly due to the information which the digital age has been able to streamline regarding brewing and distribution. Many people cite the cost benefit of buying budweiser over craft beer, however if you do the simple math it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly that craft beer is as good a deal in $$$/ABV (Alcohol By Volume) if not better in many cases (Stouts and IPAs). Sadly the blue collar crowd which constitutes the bulk of the macro lager market often lacks the math skills to figure this simple fact out and is also quite prone to the advertising behemoth (however innacurate) that is “American” macro lager. I hope in the future that as craft brewers gain market share they focus there efforts not on making more elaborate and alien hybrid beers but on educating working class americans on the quality, workmanship and value that go into true AMERICAN BEER.

The only remaining market based argument that is put forth for macro lagers is the calorie count per beer which has come under scrutiny lately as the big 3 put out lighter and lighter beer (see AB/INBEV 55 and MGD 64). While the calorie count is markedly low on beers one must realize that the ABV will fluctuate inversely. This means while MDG 64 has only 64 calories it is also only 2.8% ABV, approximately 1/3 the strength of a middle of the road IPA or typical porter, stout, or wheat beer. Bud select 55 is simliar having even less, a paltry 2.4% ABV, many typical imperial/double stouts have upwards of 4 times this much alcohol yet there is no trace of alcohol anywhere in the flavor. It is fairly simple to follow the logic here and it permeates on up through all the macro lagers, bud light is a mere 4.2% ABV and even full calorie budweiser in all it’s glory is 5% ABV, about equivalent to a weak pale ale.

The logical conclusion to this problem is thus to just drink liquor, however the kicker to the whole “low calorie” myth that the big 3 have helped permeate is the fact that the calories in alcohol have very little to do with the weight gain so commonly associated with it’s consumption. In fact the source of the weight gain related to alcohol has to do with the alcohol itself preventing the normal metabolic action of the body to function thus the calorie count is largely marginial. When alcohol is processed by the liver it forms acetate which replaces fat in the metabolic process, therefore as long as acetate is present (until you are sobered all the way up) all the fat you eat is stored directly into the body which can, in extreme cases, precipitate the “beer gut”. The bottom line is calories contribute VERY little to this effect; it isn’t much different than the famous simpsons episodes featuring a shot of the “duff” brewery where 3 types of duff (light, original and dry) are all shown being poured out of one big tube.

To summarize:
Craft beer = True high quality American product
“American” lite lager = a cheap imported knockoff
Big 3 Advertising dollars spent annually > Entire cost of American Beer Market AND IT WORKS.
Macro lagers = Weak beer (literally, it was marketed on this point)
Low Calorie Beer Benefits = Medically proven scam

These distinctions are not my opinion, they are fact and until these simple points are made more widely clear craft beer will stay a slowly growing, limited market product despite being vastly superior to the chinese and south american manufactured knockoff competition. It is a rarity for a truly superior product to get be in such a minority but in this case the lobbying power of the big 3 is huge and the move to lite beer was the first and most successful marketing campaign to date. The way forward would be to simply have people try a couple new styles and brewers much as in soda adds, however the difference in beverages here would be all the craft beer market would need, that first couple of tastes would most likely solidify a majority of the market. Whether this happens or not will be entirely up to the burgeoning new craft beer community, lets hope they go for the obvious.

I hope this laid clear what AMERICAN beer truly is and the state of the beer market today. The causes trace back several hundred years as the article stated but the current state of the beer market in the U.S. is in fact nearly the opposite of what was inferred by the title.

*Note: There is actually only a big 2 left as Miller and Coors is now Miller/Coors but as this isn’t as publicly known as the AB/INBEV buyout I didn’t indicate it for sake of simplicity. In actuality the “Big 3″ brewers of macro lager (junk beer) would be AB/INBEV, Miller/Coors and Heineken.

I have to cite 2 sources for most of this info:
http://www.beeradvocate.com
http://beerwarsmovie.com/ (The movie, not the website)

I moved to San Francisco from St. Louis, home of Anheuser-Busch. This was a time when micro-breweries were really picking up momentum in popularity. Every bar in San Francisco offered the hometown beer (Anchor Steam) on tap. Additionally, you could readily find Newcastle, Guinness, Red Hook, Sierra Nevada, Prohibition, John Courage, and a host of other beers.

There was a prevailing sense, then, that drinking a mass-produced, American lager, was something only rednecks and/or idiots did. Cultured people did not touch the stuff. There would be times in certain bars or restaurants, that you would be judged by patrons and employees alike if you asked for a Bud.

So I didn’t. For many years. And then I came to my senses. And here’s what I have to say about it: the notion that American Lager is substandard beer is an elitist bunch of bullshit. For those of us that sit down to DRINK lots of beer, there is nothing better than American lager. Not everyone likes an 8% (or more) beer that weighs heavy on the stomach or has been steeped with extensive hops flavoring. There is a reason mass produced American beers are popular: it’s because the breweries are the best at what they do – produce a light, highly-drinkable lager. American beers are so good, in fact, that other cultures (such as the Japanese) have tried copying them because of their popularity in their respective countries (Asahi and Kirin Ichiban are both the Japanese versions of American lagers, yet you seldom hear anyone shitting on those brands, perhaps because they’re perceived as being “exotic”)

Ironically enough, over time I knew many, MANY, bartenders and bar employees in San Francisco, who had enough of the notion that drinking anything other than micro-brews was a “pedestrian” mindset, and began to rediscover mainstream American brands.

To this day I still proudly love American beer. I am not a hillbilly, I’m not a republican, I don’t own a gun, I have an extensive education, I’ve enjoyed many, many varieties of beer, but I always go back to what I love best: ice cold, light, American beer. There is nothing finer than an ice cold Budweiser and a plate full of fresh, steaming-hot chicken wings.

And anyone who disputes this, forgive me for saying, is a fucking idiot.

Anyway, on a tangent, I’m currently an interesting (and long) book on the prohibition movement and how exactly it was passed.

Very interesting reading for the more in-depths cultural aspects around alcohol in the US.

Kieren

And restaurants are holding more and more decent beers. However, bars are still dominated by the rat’s piss varieties of Bud, Coors, Miller etc.

So, it’s undeniably getting better, but still some way to go.

I live in a pretty small town in Minnesota and even my po-dunk little liquor store carries some of the absolute top in micro-brews. Surly Beer for one has one the highest rated brews *in the world* labeled Darkness.
Even the snooty and highbrow beeradvocate.com has 6 American brews in their top 10 all-time best brews…
http://beeradvocate.com/top_beers

Bottom line is if you think a good brew is hard to find in the US you are probably just lazy and really don’t have any idea what constitutes a good brew in the first place.