Beer in the United States

In the United States, beer is manufactured in breweries which range in size from industry giants to brew pubs and microbreweries. The United States produced 196 million barrels of beer in 2012, and consumes roughly of beer per capita annually. In 2011, the United States was ranked fifteenth in the world in per capita consumption, while total consumption was second only to China.
Although beer was a part of colonial life across the North American settlements, the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 resulted in the prohibition of alcoholic beverage sales, forcing nearly all American breweries to close or switch to producing non-alcoholic products. After the repeal of Prohibition, the industry consolidated into a small number of large-scale breweries. Many of the big breweries that returned to producing beer after Prohibition, today largely owned by international conglomerates like Anheuser-Busch InBev, still retain their dominance of the market in the 21st century. However, the majority of the new breweries that have opened in the U.S. over the past three decades have been small breweries and brewpubs, referred to as "craft breweries" to differentiate them from the larger breweries.
The most common style of beer produced by the big breweries is pale lager. Beer styles indigenous in the United States include amber ale, cream ale, and California common. More recent craft styles include American Pale Ale, American IPA, India Pale Lager, Black IPA, and the American "Double" or "Imperial" IPA.

History

Beginnings

The earliest record of brewing in the Americas dates from 1587, and the first commercial brewery in North America was built by the Dutch West India Company in 1632 in Lower Manhattan on Brewers Street. On February 5, 1663, Nicholas Varlett obtained from Peter Stuyvesant a patent for a brewery on Castle Point in Hoboken, New Jersey.
The brewing traditions of England and the Netherlands ensured that colonial drinking would be dominated by beer rather than wine. Until the middle of the 19th century, British-style ales dominated American brewing. This changed when the longer shelf-life lager styles brought by German immigrants turned out to be more profitable for large-scale manufacturing and shipping. The hops in lager had preservative qualities, while non-hopped local ales of the time quickly turned sour and were a perceived risk to drink.
The lager brewed by these companies was originally based on several different styles of Central Europe, but the Pilsener style, using mild Czech hops, pale, lightly roasted six-row barley and often adjuncts such as rice and corn, gradually won out.
Steam beer, the first uniquely American beer style, evolved in the San Francisco area during the 19th century. It was born out of the desire to produce lager beer without the use of refrigeration. After prohibition ended, the Anchor Brewing Company was left as the sole producer of steam beer. The company was near closure in 1965, whereupon Fritz Maytag, great-grandson of the Maytag Corporation founder, rescued the brewery and with it the steam beer style. Anchor has since trademarked the term "Steam Beer" and all subsequent renditions of the style are now termed California common.
D.G. Yuengling & Son, commonly called Yuengling, is the oldest operating brewing company in the United States, having been established in 1829 by David Yuengling, and is one of the largest breweries by volume in the country. Headquartered in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, it is currently the largest American-owned brewery.
One of the earliest large-scale brewers was Best Brewing, a Milwaukee brewery built by German immigrant Phillip Best in the 1840s. Other successful breweries of the era begun by German immigrants in Milwaukee included Valentin Blatz Brewing Company, Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, and Miller Brewing Company.
Pabst began shipping its beer to Chicago and St. Louis the following decade, first by ferry and eventually by rail, establishing an early trans-market beer brand in the United States. Rail transportation of beer in refrigerated cars became common in the last decades of the 19th century, allowing brands like Pabst to undersell previously unchallenged local beers in distant cities, and establishing lager's dominance in the market since it could better withstand being shipped.
Missouri's Weston Brewing Company was first established in 1842 by German immigrant John Georgian. Georgian brought the tradition of lager brewing with him when he settled in Weston. The brewery was designed to utilize ice from the Missouri River during winter and lagering cellars dug deep into the ground to create ideal conditions for his beer which needed to be stored below 60 degrees for more than six weeks. In creating the brewery, the Weston Brewing Company became one of the first lager breweries in the United States.
In St. Louis, a prosperous German soap maker, Eberhard Anheuser, purchased a struggling brewery in 1860. His daughter married a brewery supplier, Adolphus Busch, who took over the company after his father-in-law's death, and renamed it Anheuser-Busch. Busch soon toured Europe, discovering the success of Bohemian lager, and introduced Budweiser beer in 1876. Anheuser-Busch, and its Budweiser beer, later the largest brewery and beer brand in the world. The company innovated the use of refrigeration in rail cars to transport its beers, which helped make bottled Budweiser the first national beer brand in the United States.
A massive increase in immigration to the United States from Central and Eastern Europe led to an increase in beer consumption between 1880 and 1920 despite an overall decline in per capita alcohol consumption.
In 1912, the use of brown bottles began to be used by Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This innovation has since been accepted worldwide and prevents harmful rays from destroying the quality and stability of beer.

Prohibition

On January 16, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was enacted into law, inaugurating the Prohibition era, wherein the production, sale and transportation of alcoholic beverages was made illegal. All legal American brewing came to a halt when prohibition was imposed, though the earlier temperance movement had already reduced the number of breweries significantly. Only a few breweries, mainly the largest, were able to stay in business by manufacturing near beer, malt syrup, or other non-alcohol grain products, in addition to soft drinks such as colas and root beers. Production and shipping of alcohol was largely confined to illegal operations that could deliver compact distilled beverages—smuggled rum and domestic moonshine—more efficiently and reliably than bulkier products such as beer.
American prohibition was repealed by degrees. First, the Volstead Act defining "intoxicating liquors", was amended in April 1933 by the Cullen–Harrison Act to provide that beer with a strength of up to 3.2% alcohol was not "intoxicating", and thus not prohibited. Within 24 hours of legalization, as much as 1.5 million barrels of 3.2% ABW beer was sold, causing some to predict a "beer famine". Soon thereafter, in December of the same year, the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution repealed prohibition in general, but left the production of alcoholic beverages heavily regulated by federal, state, and local authorities. Included in these regulations was the imposition of a three-tier distribution system, in which a manufacturer of alcoholic beverages must go through a wholesale distributor to sell its product, rather than selling to retailers directly.

Post Prohibition

Although the Twenty-first Amendment allowed brewers to legally resume practicing their craft, many "dry" counties remained and many states failed to ratify altogether, which slowed the resurgence of the brewing industry. In addition, the many prohibitionists of the temperance movement were still quite vocal and were able to retain a large following despite the repealing of the eighteenth amendment. Before the American beer industry could attempt to re-establish itself, World War II began. This further inhibited the re-emergence of smaller breweries because much of the grain supply was rationed due to the war, forcing the breweries to use adjuncts such as corn and rice alongside the barley traditionally used in brewing. The prohibitionists saw a tantalizing opportunity to quell the efforts of the remaining breweries, insisting that the commercial brewing of beer squandered manpower, grain, fuel, and cargo space that should have gone towards the war effort overseas. Brewers responded to these accusations by extolling the benefits that brewer's yeast have on human health, namely their high vitamin B content. It was argued that the increase in thiamine in the diets of the soldiers and factory workers would improve performance on the battlefield as well as in the factory and that this increase sufficiently justified the need for beer. The American government decided that the benefits of the vitamin B in brewer's yeast, alongside the taxes coming in from beer sales, were enough to justify a request for fifteen percent of beer production for servicemen.
Although America's breweries had the backing of their government, they still needed to capture the hearts and the wallets of the American people. In order to accomplish this, the major breweries banded together and launched the "Morale is a Lot of Little Things" advertising campaign. The campaign can be well summarized from the following 1942 magazine advertisement:

"If you’re a man, it’s a shine on your shoes... the sweet feel of a fly rod in your hand... If you’re a woman, it’s a tricky new hair-do maybe... or a change of lipstick. Morale is a lot of little things like that. People can take the big bad things... the bitter news, the bombings even... if only a few of the little, familiar, comforting good things are left."

From the time America entered the war in 1941 until it ended in 1945, the overall production of beer increased by over 40% despite the small number of active breweries. This wartime growth allowed the large breweries such as Anheuser-Busch to dominate the American market for over fifty years. During this period they produced beers more noted for their uniformity than for any particular flavor. Beers such as those made by Anheuser-Busch and Coors Brewing Company followed a restricted pilsner style, with large-scale industrial processes and the use of low-cost ingredients like corn or ingredients such as rice that provided starch for alcohol production while contributing minimal flavor to the finished product. The dominance of the so-called "macrobrew" led to an international stereotype of "American beer" as poor in quality and flavor.
File:Founders Curmudgeon.jpg|thumb|200px|Goblet of Founders Curmudgeon Old Ale, an American craft beer