National American Beer Day honors all American beers produced by more than 8,800 breweries. The 2021 beer market, according to the U.S. Brewers Association, was worth $100.2 billion.
Wine Enthusiast explains that all beers fall into two categories: ales and lagers. What differentiates them is how yeast is added, brewing temperature, and aging process.
Ale styles include India pale ale (IPA) – the most popular craft beer style today; other pale ales; stouts; sours; and wheat beers. Common lagers are Pilsners, Helles, Mexican lagers, and Vienna lagers. You can find out what is distinctive about each of them as well as other beer styles, here.
Archeologists have found evidence from 13,000 years ago that people brewed wheat and barley. One of the reasons for the popularity of alcoholic drinks was the uncertain quality of the water supply. Since water was where waste (including sewage) was dumped, people reasoned it might not be so healthy or tasty to quench thirst with it as well.
Beer making began in earnest in the 10th Century when the Catholic Church sanctioned the use of abbeys to brew and distribute beer to generate funds for their upkeep.
It took until the 1930’s however for mankind to come up with a can to put the beer in.
According to an online history of beer cans, in 1933, the American Can Company installed a temporary canning line at New Jersey’s Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company. Krueger’s filled 2,000 cans with 3.2% Krueger beer – the highest alcohol content allowed at the time. The cans of beer were given to faithful Krueger drinkers; 91% gave it thumbs up, and 85% said it tasted more like draft than bottled beer. Reassured by this successful test, Krueger gave canning beer the green light.
The first beer cans were flat top cans.
There are now several different types of cans used for beer, including the flat top, cone top, pull tab, and stay tab. (Stay tabs were developed because pull tabs turned out to be a health hazard when accidentally ingested, not to mention an environmental disaster.) Stay tabs, as the name implies, stay connected to the can.
USA Today informs us, in case we didn’t already notice, that “Beer is big business in America.” Still, beer consumption is actually down, as millennials are apparently migrating to wine and mixed drinks.
The Congressional Research Service reports, however, that American production of craft alcoholic beverages — whether beer, wine, liqueurs, distilled spirits, cider/Perry, mead, or fermented drinks — has increased in recent years in response to rising demand. In 2020, there were an estimated 21,745 businesses producing craft beverages in the United States, with sales of roughly $32 billion annually. (Of those craft alcohol businesses, as of 2021, a total number of 9,118 in the United States focused on beer. Sales from craft beers accounted for 13.1% of total annual beer sales in 2021.)
The Congressional Research Service allows that the concept of what is considered craft is often controversial. In general, however, the craft beverage industry is characterized by small-scale production — usually by independent or startup companies — and by localized production and distribution. Often the term artisan is used to indicate small-batch production or the use of non-traditional ingredients (e.g., alternate grains, herbs, and botanicals) in production. Some definitions also focus on the degree of innovation, on-site venues, and community involvement. (See this detailed definition from the Brewers Association.)
In any event, the U.S. isn’t even in the list of top ten countries for beer consumption per capita. Number one on the list is the Czech Republic, which has topped the list for per capita consumption for 23 consecutive years!
Belgium is not even the top ten, in spite of having more individual styles of beer per capita than any other country in the world; in 2011, the country produced 1,132 distinct types of beer. The Flanders Tourist Office claims there are now over 2,000 unique beers. The Flemish province of Brabant alone makes over 400 of those beers. (Its capital is Leuven, also home to AB InBev, the world’s largest brewing company.)
Source: 2017 AB InBev Annual Report
When bars in Belgium serve a beer, they put it in a matching glass, because differing glass shapes are thought to be essential in bringing out the specific characteristics and aromas of each beer. (According to travel maven Rick Steves, if a Belgian bar runs out of a specific glass, the bartender asks if you’ll accept a similar glass. Many Belgians will switch beers rather than drink one from the wrong glass.) This means that bars not only need to stock many, many beers, but many, many glasses in which to serve them!
There are only 10 authentic Trappist breweries left in the world, and six of those are in Belgium. Westvleteren XII, a Trappist beer brewed not far from the city of Ypres, is often called the best beer in the world. It has a perfect 100 rating on both beeradvocate.com and ratebeer.com and has been voted as the #1 beer by several beer and consumer polls.
Belgium is also known for “lambic” beer, which is a spontaneously fermented beer. In spontaneous fermentation, the malt and hops are left to cool in the open air. This introduces wild yeast into the mixture, giving the brew a quality that is unique to the region where it was brewed, since it depends on the natural yeasts in the air to start the fermentation. Lambic is made exclusively in Belgium’s Zenne valley, where the wild yeasts Brettanomyces bruxellensis and Brettanomyces lambicus thrive. The result is a unique beer type known as Geuze (pronounced like “goose”).
In Bruges, the De Halve Maan brewery is separated from its bottling plant, opened in 2010 in the outskirts of Bruges. So many trucks were used to transport the beer from one place to the other that the brewery’s truck fleet at one time accounted for 85 percent of Bruges’s commercial traffic. This changed, however, with the construction of an underground beer pipeline completed in September, 2016 that runs some 1.8 miles under the city and in a single hour pumps out roughly 4,000 liters of beer, enough to fill 12,000 bottles. Interestingly, the pipeline was partly financed by a crowdfunding campaign, which raised more than 300,000 euros ($335,000) of the four million ($4.5 million) needed.
The current holder of the Guinness World Record for most available beers on the menu is Delirium Cafe, located in Belgium’s capital city of Brussels. They have some 4,000 beers available on their shelves. You’d have to drink 8.5 beers every day for a year just to taste them all.
Need a guide to beer halls in Belgium? The Flanders Tourist website has an excellent one!
Or maybe you would like to try a beer made from fog. As Aatlas Obscura reports:
“The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is the world’s driest non-polar desert, receiving less than 0.004 inches of rain each year. In coastal communities such as Peña Blanca, the main source of fresh water comes in the form of thick cloud banks, known as camanchaca, that roll inland off the Pacific Ocean. Desert dwellers have developed unique methods of capturing this moisture: The llama-like guanaco, for instance, carefully sips the condensation from cactus spines. Chileans, meanwhile, trap water with fog-catching nets.”
And of course, they trap water to make beer. The Atrapaniebla brewery (Atrapaniebla means “fog catcher” in Spanish) currently produces 24,000 liters each year that get distributed around Chile in bottle and on tap. Atrapaniebla currently makes two beers: an amber Scottish ale and a dark brown ale. The brewers contend that the water from the camanchaca gives the beers a wholly unique taste, that the freshness and purity of the fog water adds clarity and depth that’s unrivaled by other brews.
The nets that catch the fog in Pena Blanca and provide the local brewery with very pure water, via Lords of the Drinks
Wondering how much beer consumption there is by state in the US and what kinds are consumed? Find data here at The Visual Capitalist. And if you are curious about how ancient beer tasted, you can watch a vieo on “How to Make Ancient Mesoptamain Beer” using a 4,000-year-old brewing method, here.
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