I guess it really depends on what you consider a “real” American. Most Americans are the descendants of immigrants and most of the American breweries (craft especially) that I’m aware of tend to be located in places known for being centers of German immigration.
The Boston Beer Company (produces Sam Adams Lager) is one of the big breweries that I’d consider full on “American.” Its founder, James Koch, is considered to be an influential figure in America’s craft brewing movement. No surprise, the man was born to German-American parents and the family had brewers going back several generations.
In essence, American brewing has strong roots in European tradition but is steadily growing on its own. Some of my local breweries produce absolutely great stuff.
Too bad you have fellow Americans spewing nonsense on the internet, while there's clearly good stuff happening when it comes to brewing quality craft beers
There are about 333 million Americans, of course some of them will spew nonsense on the internet. I live in a town with a population of around 7000 and we have breweries, wineries, distilleries, and dispensensaries, all serving quality products. I guess it depends on what you choose to see.
Adding to the conversation, what do we even mean by “craft beer”? The only real definition there is beer that isn’t mass-produced (compared to, say, Bud Light, which is made in a largely industrialized and standardized process for more efficient production on larger scales).
Like, people keep saying “craft beer” to mean “good beer”, or at least “beer that isn’t beer that I dislike”. But OOP’s just revealing that they know practically nothing about beer.
So a craft beer can't stay craft if it's really good you mean? In my area there were a number of good beers developped by locals. Eventually the production moved to a professional brewery to provide enough bottles to distribute to local bars, restaurants, etc.
Craft refers specifically to scale of production and ownership. Less than six million barrels a year, and < 25% ownership by a beverage company that isn't another craft brewery. That's the industry definition, at least.
That was actually a genuine question. If a superb craft beer gets picked up by a large brewery and gets mass produced, the definition of craft beer doesn't apply anymore. Or am I seeing this wrong?
In Belgium we got a lot of special beers though. Some started out as a craft beer, but got into mass production
Oh, my bad. I interpreted it as "your definition is wrong because it implies that craft beers aren't good enough to be made on a larger scale". Personally, I think of craft beer as more of a hand-on process, as opposed to mass-produced beers that have a standardized recipe and use larger, more automated production methods that use less human input.
But I'm gonna go ahead and delete my last comment, since it was spicier than was appropriate for the conversation.
The key part is "local". Many local businesses brew at industrial-scale breweries, it's cheaper than establishing and maintaining your own and allows you to produce more than you would in your basement. They still take quality over quantity approach overall and their output is nowhere near that of the big players on the market that sell tons of product in multiple countries.
True words and maybe the definition of local varies upon countries. I live in a small country. Lets say beers from a radius of 10-20 km are local to me. A 1h drive is far away here 🤣
Yes, because the big American breweries all brew absolute garbage. They are basically soda companies. So people had to start doing it themselves to get a decent beer.
Basically, yes. We've always had a few old "craft" breweries but only in the last coupla' decades did people realize we could locally brew our own beer and were willing to pay for it.
I've been to Belgium a few times and never fail to be astonished at the variety and quality of the beer.
The UK, BTW, is highly underrated for beer, and even many of the locals make fun of traditional UK cask ales (which are as good as some of the Belgians in my opinion)...
Care to elaborate? I'm Cherokee from Oklahoma and was always taught that natives never really had any significant exposure to alcohol until European settlers showed up, which is how I read the other persons comment.
Certain breweries making craft beer was known, e.g. Anchor and Sierra Nevada, but the American Craft Brewery Revolution has been going strong since the mid-2000's.
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u/flepke 27d ago
So real Americans making craft beer is just a recent hype? takes a sip from my Belgian craft beer