Franconian Beer Message Board

What Brewers Brew
Posted by Nick B. on 2017-03-04 01:53:42
What sells? Here in Franconia, people seem to tend to want to continue eating and drinking what's familiar to them. And they have centuries of familiarity with what they've been eating and drinking. Only in recent decades have they been exposed to strange new things to eat and drink that weren't raised and produced right there in and around their own village. (In the country, at least, maybe not so much in the cities.)

That situation is a bit different to the vast majority of post-bicentennial US brewers(*). Prohibition having decimated the brewing industry isn't the only fundamental change that affected US beer drinking habits in the 20th century. I think big migrations of people going back to the 19th century also had an affect. As such, a given area in the US won't have a tradition of each village having had a brewery along with a bakery and butcher's, going back generations.

What traditional beer drinking there is that goes back generations in most of the US is Bud/Miller/Coors-type adjunct lager.  Americans who want to drink something different to that are more open drinking various different things. And the brewers are open to brewing various different things.

Meh, whatever. I don't really have a point to make on this, just musing. Who wants to shoot my musings down with alternate facts...ideas?

(* How's that for a nominal term to refer to the new crop of brewpubs, microbreweries, and contract breweries that have formed the beer revolution in reaction to Bud/Miller/Coors/Schlitz/Pabst/Heilemann/Yuengling since the late 70's?)