German Beer or American Beer - which is better??

And we're back!  It's been a while since I've blogged.  So I thought I'd come out nice and easy.  Try not to hit any sensitive areas.  But then I decided to hell with that.  I'm gonna talk about something that is very dear in the hearts of the German people.  We're going to talk about beer.  It's something that the Germans have been making for thousands of years.  Many years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. 

Germans have been making beer for a very long time.  They've had thousands of years to perfect it, altering the ingredients a bit and the process of making it.  Now for some reason or another, about 500 years ago, they issued a law called the "Reinheitsgebot."  The Reinheitsgebot stipulated that you could use only barley, hops, and water may be used to make the brew.  And what I can say about that is that those 4 ingredients make a good quality beer.  And Germans are quite proud of their beer.  Which is why I'm nervous to say what I'm gonna say next. 

I think that the U.S. has better beer. 

Now I know that every German is like, "Ach quatsch!  Amerikanisches Bier schmeckt wie Pisse!"  Which roughly translates to: "Fiddlesticks!  American beer tastes like piss!" 

For some reason when I say that American beer is better, they seem to get all riled up and start dissing our beer in the U.S.  Fair enough, but let me form a rebuttal.  

Here is why American beer is better in my personal opinion.  

This graph demonstrates the key idea that I think that Belgium and Germany have lower standard deviations.  They have several different types of beer that are "really good" and "good," but they stick with what they've been doing for the last 3,000 years.  Which means that -- again… this is all my opinion, but please don't hate me… I like German beer! -- it just means that in my opinion, Germans beers are missing a little creativity. 

Which is why I think the U.S. has a wider variety.  The U.S. is a new country.  We don't have a 3,000 year old beer culture and we don't have any law that says we can only use 4 ingredients.  So we're like little kids at the fountain soda machine!  We wanna try all of the flavors1, and we want to try all of the different combinations too.  You never know!  You might invent the next best soda! 

That's what we do in the U.S. with beer.  We throw lemon in there, lime, raspberries, chocolate, probably blueberries (I donno, but probably), coffee, ect. 

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a beer with avocado or something in it.  Ok.  Yup… I just looked it up… Avocado Ale.

Now the fact that there is an Avocado Ale that comes out of L.A. doesn't surprise me at all, but if I were to tell that to a group of Germans and then take a picture it would probably be the best picture of disgusted faces of all time.

What that means is yes, we have a lot of shitty beers in the U.S.  So I agree with the Germans when they say that our beer tastes like piss.  It certainly is.  But we do things to these shitty beers to shift them to the right on the quality-axis… maybe getting it to "not bad."  We add pickles or olives to beers like bud light (again with the disgusted faces).  But what you need to realize is that we're taking our shitty beer and trying to make it better!  That's the creativity that I'm talking about.  Americans all over the place are doing whatever they can to make shitty beer taste better. 

I'll do an experiment with you to prove my point about this.  I hypothesize that if I google "How to make a shitty beer taste better" I will come up with all kinds of options, but if I google in German "Geschmack von Bier verbessern" on google.de I won't come up with anything. 

Ok…

So it turns out that the first option on google is some sort of invention to make beer taste better that looks simply like a french press, but it's for beer.  And every site after that had ideas as well.  One was to drop a jolly rancher in the beer! 

Now on google.de I see that the german wiki how has an idea of adding some lemon, tomato juice, Tabasco, and salt.  Sounds delicious!  I'd try it!

The next one is where a guy talks about how beer tastes better in a glass then out of a bottle.  He even makes a stab at American beer by saying that American beer always comes without a glass.2   And then he goes on to say how pouring the beer is very important, bla bla bla. 

Actually, it's what I would expect for an answer.  Ask a German how to make a beer taste better and they say, "drink it out of a glass that way you can smell it too." Ask and American person how to make a beer better and they start throwing jolly ranchers in it and pulling out their french press and mixing stuff in with it.  It's because Germans are mostly drinking good beers (see graph above) and Americans are very often stuck drinking lots of shitty beers (not necessarily by choice!  You just can't escape it!)… in which case we throw in pickles or olives or something.  If we had mostly good beers in the U.S. we probably wouldn't do it either. 

The next German site on google was about what Alcoholic free beer tastes like.  And I'm not going to tell you the 4th result because it's so irrelevant an definitely not appropriate for this conversation!  (check it out if you're interested) 

So in conclusion of the experiment, you can see that I have a point. 

Now you may be thinking, "sure Brian, Americans like to throw stuff in their shitty beer and they think it tastes better.  Big Deal.  You still only have "not bad" beer." 

But wait!  There's more!  Our need to make shitty beers taste better evolved into something that I like to call the Beer Revolution. 

You see… it was a long time ago (in American standards… so a few hundred years) that our colonial mothers and fathers were kicking back with a cold one made from the local brewery. 

There were thousands of breweries back in the day.  And in the late 1800s some German immigrants got in on the action started up some breweries like Budweiser, Coors, Miller, Pabst, Anchor, etc. 

But leading into in the 1920s we experienced a period of grayness that turned into utter darkness.  One of the darker times in our nation's history.  Thousands of breweries turned into just one thousand.  And in 1918 the 18th Amendment signaled the Prohibition.  A time with no alcohol, and thus no beer.  Beer production halted and the love that American's once had for beer was lost in the darkness.  It wasn't until after WWII that beer production started up again. 

After WWII, only a few of the companies survived the blow that was caused by the Prohibition, and beer was growing in popularity again.  And a few companies produced one style of beer and dominated the market.  Macrobreweries like Budweiser and Coors followed a pilsner style lager with shitty ingredients.  Giving rise to the "Shitty American Beer" that tastes like piss. 

By the 1970's there were only 60ish breweries (down from 4000).  And the major breweries dominated the United States. 

But then… through the evolution of a few people trying to make shitty beers taste better.  Microbreweries started forming in the 1970's and 80's and rising up to over 3,000 today.  And now everyone is starting up breweries.  Almost every city has one, and if it doesn't I bet there are tons of people doing it in their garage. 

And they are throwing raspberries and chocolate and everything they can think of in there to try and make a great beer. We've had too long of a time without any beer at all, and too long of a time with shitty beer to settle for just "good" or "very good beer"  We are reaching for the stars.  Everyone is trying to find out what's better than "great."  Perhaps we can find "Awesome" or "F#*king Awesome" and beyond! 

The U.S. is in the midst of a Beer Revolution!  And more and more people are climbing aboard.  And once again, we are enjoying a cold one out on the porch like our colonial mothers and fathers.  They would be so proud.

So if you do go to the land of "Shitty Beer" make sure you stay away from the macrobreweries such as Budweiser, Coors, Miller, Pabst, etc.3

And if you're in the U.S. then drink an IPA for me… they are hard to come by where I'm at.

Side Stories that may or may not be relevant to anything:

1. I once was at a gas station, and had been really looking forward to drinking a cherry coke.   It was a long day skiing and a cherry coke was gonna hit the spot.  We got big gulps.  We weren't messing around.  That is… we weren't messing around until I realized that they had flavoring options.  I thought, "hey… maybe extra cherries in my Cherry Coke would be good."  So I did it.  I put extra cherry flavoring in my Chery Coke and it was terrible.  Apparently they have added the perfect amount of cherries to the Cherry Coke.  Don't try it. 
2. I got an idea buddy.  Add a jolly rancher to that beer!
3. Interestingly, I found that these were all started by German immigrants.