History of American Beer

This history video walks you through the rich history of America's beers and their breweries.

Hi and welcome to watchmojo.com. My name is Nick Shortway and I’m going to be talking about the American Brewery Industry and how this changed the appreciation of beer over the past many years. First, a little history. In the mid 19th century, German and Czech immigrants came over and change the face of brewing by introducing the laagering techniques to what was previously on the brewing. Now, this provided cleaner taste of the beer and more consistency over batches but it is not the largest that you know from most American natural breweries that are around now. These were flavorful. They were brewed with a lot of pride. Then prohibition came or as I like to call it 13 years of hell. Prohibition knocked out almost all of the microbreweries in states. Hundreds of microbrewery shut down because they couldn’t produce beer anymore. There were few that maintain throughout the 13 years of the prohibition of until 1933 when it’s refilled. These were course and has a bush and others that you may have heard of, the big names. Now, this survived by producing root beer, producing non-alcoholic beer near-beer which is very little alcohol in it. So, they start using American foods tables like rice and corn to supplement and replace the multi-barley that would be more expensive. Set a poor effect on the taste and because of that they had to rely on advertising. Thankfully, in the early 1980s Hans Fritz purchased the—brewing company in San Francisco. As of now, there are over 1500 brew pubs and microbrewers in the United States. They are brewing almost a 100 different styles of beer. They’re making experimental beers. They’re combining wine yeast with beer. There are Chardonnay grapes with an IPA, they’re making all these different styles and they’re doing it almost without the support of the US. I urge you to go out and experiment as much as you can. Taste, experience and live beer!