A Global Look at Leading and Emerging Brewing Countries
Sidebar: Fighting on the Same Side
For beer drinkers, the lasting lesson of the 20th century should be to understand how wine toppled beer as the world’s most respected alcoholic drink.
Reducing a complex series of events and trends to its bare bones, the world’s wine makers, while notoriously bitchy in public about each other’s prowess, were highly collaborative behind the scenes. Hence such events as Prohibition in Norway being seen off by French vintners lobbying their government to threaten a ban on Norwegian fish imports until wine exports were re-established and the Spanish wine lobby persuading the government to use the same tactics to re-legalize wine (but not beer or spirits) in Prohibition-struck Iceland.
Meanwhile, beer makers, awash with professional bonhomie in public, fought like cats behind the scenes, failed to stem Prohibition in the United States and wound up in a near-death race to the lowest common denominator, producing uniform products of such little character that people of taste migrated to wine instead.
Is this propensity among beer people to disagree unproductively about to rear its head again with the creaking tensions between Europe and the United States over the real nature of well-crafted beer?
Nobody in Europe who follows the U.S. craft explosion of the past 30 years can doubt its massive and mostly positive impact on the history of beer. Equally, no one in the United States who follows the history of beer in Europe before the early 21st century, including the efforts to preserve traditional styles, can have any doubt about where the roots of craft beer lie.
The problem is that few on either side of the Atlantic understand the situation of the other, leading to calls in the United States for craft beer to be distinguished somehow from traditional beer, and in Europe for the latter to be “protected” from the advance of the former.
In Britain, the aging but enormous Campaign for Real Ale—170,000 subscribed members and rising—is wary that highly hopped, canned beers may be merely forerunners to a new wave of industrial dishwater, while in Germany, early fascination with expensive new foreign ale styles is tempered by mistrust of their producers’ casual disregard for the Reinheitsgebot standard.
The tragedy is that American brewers have important things to say to Europe, such as “Use better ingredients” and “It’s the taste, stupid,” while Europe’s traditional brewers could usefully trade “Re-fermentation adds character” and “Beer styles are of limited value.”
If the two sides listen to, learn from and promote each other, good beer is set for a great century. If not, failure may yet be grasped from the jaws of victory.
Stephen Beaumont & Tim Webb
Stephen Beaumont and Tim Webb are veteran beer writers with over 60 years of experience between them. They are the authors of both The Pocket Beer Guide 2015 (Firefly Books, 2014) and The World Atlas of Beer (Sterling Epicure, 2012).