In The Atlantic, Joe Pinsker writes about the historical conditions that shaped the flavor and body of America’s popular commercial brews. Like the cultural melting pot of America itself, various factors, including market forces, thirsty laborers, WWII rationing, religious movements and the idea of temperance all thinned our big brand beers into the light, offensively inoffensive yellow water they are today, and helped birth our current craft brewing renaissance in response:
But Americans didn’t develop a more unified taste in beer until the mid-1800s, when huge numbers of German immigrants─including David G. Yuengling, whose brewery still operates today, outside of Philadelphia─arrived and brought lager with them. Less intense in flavor than porters, stouts, and ales, lagers were a hit with America’s growing number of factory workers and miners, who ate at saloons near where they worked. “It was normal to get a beer with your meal, but not allowable to be tipsy on the job,” says [economics professor Ranjit] Dighe. “So if you wanted a beer, your safest option was a weak beer.”
From this perspective, wateriness was not a bug, but a feature.
By the time Prohibition was repealed, the breweries that opened went with what they knew would sell in the 1910s: light, bland beers. One man who witnessed a batch of particularly strong beer go unsold at the time said, “It is just too much hop for this generation.”
from Longreads Blog » Longreads Blog http://blog.longreads.com/2015/08/08/the-history-of-weak-american-beer/
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