Beer Infinity Beer, Brewing & Beyond
| The new world wasn’t much for beer for the first 250 years Europeans lived here. The barley and hops weren’t spectacular, and we had liquor instead. That changed when Germans started immigrating in huge numbers in the middle of the 19th century and brought their tasty lagers with them. I have a wonderful little history book called Brewed in the Pacific Northwest that lists scores and scores of breweries founded between 1850 and 1900, and nearly every one of them was helmed by a lager-brewing German. It turned the US into a beer-drinking country (per capita consumption went from about 3 gallons to 16 gallons annually). Call it the first wave of lagers.
That first wave was a monster–and indeed is still with us. It was so successful, in fact, that in its pure dominion it sparked craft brewing. Ultimately, that movement would be known far more for ales, but at the outset a lot of the earliest micros made lagers. It wasn’t really obvious in the mid-1980s what people would be drinkin … |
Source: Beervana
Read the full article here.
